


Another One of Those Heartbreak Songs

by Tierfal



Series: Loud and Clear [4]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Abusive Ex, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Drama, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Secrets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-03
Updated: 2017-07-23
Packaged: 2018-11-22 16:44:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 60,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11384256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: Sometimes the tall, dark, handsome ones are poisoned underneath.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> SWEET BABY JESUS, wow. The next two chapters come with a huge host of **warnings** : general creepiness that starts out insidiously subtle and segues into an openly abusive relationship; borderline dub-con; and stalking. AWWWWWRIGHT. :| No, seriously – if any of that is likely to be unsettling to you, now that you know what it is, you aren't going to miss _anything_ plot-wise if you wait this out / only read the present-day parts / skip ahead to chapter 3 once it's up. Please, please don't endure any hurt on account of this silly fic, okay? ♥ 
> 
> (P.S. If anybody would like me to tag anything additional up here, let me know; and I'll add it in.)
> 
> Also: this installment of the series ends in a cliffhanger that makes everything up until now look like fun and games. :'D I'm hoping to be able to keep adding one chapter per weekend all the way through this fic and the next one, but there are some editing holes I haven't filled in just yet, and I have some conventions scattered around through the summer, so there's a chance I'll get delayed. Bear with me! And/or just wait until it's all posted and then marathon the whole thing, as you prefer. XD
> 
> Final also: this fic would not have survived the first major block without Mthaytr, whose help and cheerleading was more instrumental than I can put into words; and you probably wouldn't be getting it today if it wasn't for Xyriath. We have an amazing community, guys. Please cherish your authors, and your artists, and your gif-makers, and your commenters, and your friends. ♥
> 
> After-final also since I can't shut up: the title of this one is jacked from Rob Thomas's "Something to Be", because with this fic I have now titled over 300 on AO3 alone, and any time I don't repeat myself verbatim is a win. :'D
> 
>  
> 
>  **RECAP:** We last left off with present-day!Ed about to meet up with Hohenheim in London between academic commitments; and we left past-tense!Ed about to tell Roy the story of how Kimblee fucked everything up, so that Roy wouldn't try to take Kimblebee as a client.
> 
>  

Paddington Station on a Saturday morning is significantly more populous than he expected.  At least the rush of humanity here and there and everywhere—dense streams of people parting around the kiosks, feeding out onto the platforms and dribbling up through the doors—is distracting him from the fact that he’s waiting for his father’s train.

He texted Roy a couple minutes ago _Do you want a paddington bear? they have them in like sixteen sizes. you think Elicia’s at that stage where stuffed animals have gone from uncool to cool again?_ , but it’s probably too early back home for Roy to respond.  Hopefully the phone didn’t wake him up.

Except—wait a goddamn second; Ed’s being an idiot, and the tossing and turning and jet-lag-dodging he’s been doing the last few nights is catching up.  First off, it’s ten in the morning here, which means it’s two in the morning Roy’s time.  Second, Roy’s already got a backlog of messages from him from yesterday—the trial started Roy’s-time-Friday, so he was pretty much out of commission all day, probably using his precious court recesses to pore over more material instead of dealing with messages like _I guess if you’re going to open a kitschy souvenir store in London the least you could do is give it a bad pun name like ‘Tchotchke to the City’_ from his nerdy-ass absentee boyfriend.  And then he was probably so dead-tired when he got home that he just couldn’t find the energy to answer them then.  Which is fine.  Ed totally understands that.  It’s a completely valid set of circumstances which does not in any way constitute an emergency, and Ed is _not_ going to worry about it.

He’s not.

Here he is, not worrying.  Obviously.

Shit.

They have a Krispie Kreme store here.  Sometimes globalization blows Ed’s mind.  He’s not quite brave enough to hurl processed sugar and/or mediocre fake-ass-“coffee” into the roiling mess of agitated acid that is his stomach right now, though.  Much as it would be weirdly sort of satisfying—almost poetic, really—to vomit all over Hohenheim the instant he arrives, it’s probably not worth the pain and the mess and the humiliation.

The doughnut smell is so damn generally tempting, though, that he fords the flood of people and gets into the line—the queue, the _queue_ —at one of the little food carts instead.  They’re asking for a pound fifty for a cup of tea, which is kind of silly given that you could get a box of ten of the same store-brand teabags for about that cost, but it’ll be hot, and it’ll fortify him for when the train from Oxford duly arrives.  According to the signage, it’s due on time—ten more minutes; one more woman queued up ahead of him; two pound coins jingling in his pocket as he clenches and unclenches his hand.

Despite the fact that the lady before him orders, like, eight different pastries and a complicated coffee—well, as thoroughly established, “coffee”—this is shaping up to be the longest ten-minute stretch of Ed’s entire life.  He’s not including the interminable limbo while Al was in the PICU after the thing in the factory; that doesn’t count as normal time.  That was straight-up fucking Purgatory.  That was a sampler plate of what eternity tastes like for sinners—presuming that any of that stuff is remotely credible, which is sort of difficult to believe; but on nights like that, Ed was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt if there might be _anything_ that could help him.

With tea in hand, he wanders over into a little cutesy accessories store filled to the brim with impulse buys.  Maybe something in here will be more Elicia’s style.  She keeps talking about wanting to travel the world and take pictures of everything; if it wasn’t the middle of the school-year, he would’ve slipped her mom a check for the airfare and brought her with him for this trip.

Her style has shifted from sort of a girly-lite-goth to a subtly-vintage-with-a-hint-of-punk, which is making this a bit of a challenge.  He has to do better than a T-shirt with a glittery outline of a red phone booth, though; what he really needs is…

Classy black chandelier-y earrings that come in a _package_ blazoned with a bunch of Union Jacks, for a start.  Maybe he can find her some Sherlock Holmes merchandise later; she’s still got Al’s copy of Doyle’s complete works stashed in her bedroom.

He manages to negotiate the purchase item, the cup of tea, and the bills to buy it by playing musical hands on the counter by the register, and then he tucks the earrings into one of the inner pockets of his laptop bag to keep them safe.  He almost forgets the tea, which is a pretty clear sign of how much he needs it, and then he strolls back out to the platform, and…

Finally, _finally_ , the train rumbles up, hissing steam.

And that’s when his heart clambers up his throat and sticks there, throbbing like a raw wound.

He tries to count the lengths of his breaths—tries to hold the most recent gasp of air for one, two, three, _four_ full seconds before he lets it out; tries to hear Roy’s soft voice in his ear; tries to feel Roy’s soft hands on his back, his shoulders, his neck.

His heartbeat jitters around behind his collarbones like it’s come loose off a string, and his whole chest tightens up around it like it’s trying not to let the pulse escape—but so far he’s still breathing; he has to focus on that.

He stumbles backwards a few steps to move the fuck out of the way as people start pouring off of the train and filtering through the turnstiles.  He looks intently up at the high, arching iron frame of the ceiling, bowing on both sides like a… curly bracket.  Like a curly bracket.  For notation.  Just like that.

He shoves his left hand into his pocket, fumbles until he gets a hold of his phone, and squeezes it tight between his fingers.  Al and Roy are both just a long-distance phone call away.

And Al won’t judge him.  Al won’t hold this against him—whatever happens.  Al just wants him to be happy; that’s all.  Al wants him to do what _he_ wants.  And if that’s scrabbling for closure?  Fine.  If that’s turning his back right now and walking out of this train station and going and having a scone somewhere and never seeing his father’s face again?  Al’ll still love him just as much.

He has nothing to lose.

And that’s liberating.

He breathes out slowly—slow and as steadily as he can—and drags his gaze back down to the eddy of humanity spilling from the train.

Hohenheim’s just fitting himself through the turnstile, frowning slightly as the pole in front of him resists the pressure of his hand instead of rotating properly.  The nearby attendant sighs soundlessly and smacks a button, and it gives way, and Hohenheim smiles and edges through.  He pushes at his glasses with a fingertip, glances around himself, and—

Only smiles wider as his eyes find Ed.

Ed’s tried a thousand times to calculate it, but he’s never figured out the optimal distance for offering someone a verbal greeting when they’ve already seen you.  There are too many variables—ambient noise; air quality; how much spit’s still in your mouth after a narrow aversion of a streak of panic.

“Hey,” he says when Hohenheim gets kind of close.

It sounds weird.  It sounds fucked up.  It sounds like the sort of thing you’d say to someone that you _know_.

And at the same time, he can hear the guardedness in his own damn voice.  It’s not _Hey, Dad_.  It’s not much of anything.  It’s deliberately noncommittal, because he doesn’t know what the hell to say.

“Good morning!” Hohenheim says brightly.

It’s a damn good thing Ed didn’t have a doughnut, because he’d _actually_ puke.

“I was thinking on the ride up about what you might like to do,” Hohenheim says.  He nudges the bridge of his glasses again even though they haven’t slipped at all.  “Is it your first time here?”

That’s it—the thing about Hohenheim that makes Ed feel absolutely fucking gutted every single time.

He _acts_ like they’ve been close all these fucking years, talks like there’s no lost love between them, and then oh-so-fucking blithely asks about shit he’d already know if he’d ever even tried to make that true.

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “I did a little bit of the touristy kind of stuff the last couple days.”

“Have you seen Kensington Gardens?” Hohenheim asks.  When Ed shakes his head, Hohenheim extends a hand to point.  “We could walk from here, if you’d like—it’s really very pleasant.”

Ed swallows.  Bitter brambles all the way down, plummeting into his stomach and splashing in the tea he’s been chugging.

“Sure,” he says.

“Wonderful,” Hohenheim says, sounding like he means it.  “I think it’ll be very nice to have a little stroll and just… catch up.”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  Hohenheim gestures, then starts leading the way, and Ed must still have the cup of tea in his hand, but he can’t seem to feel it as he follows.  “Okay.”

  


* * *

  


It had been just about two and a half years prior to the day Roy walked into Has Beans and asked for a coffee and ruined Ed’s life in the best possible way.  There’d been one last big bookstore in town—Roy probably didn’t remember; the Borders had gone spectacularly out of business, and then a family with too much money and too much time on their hands had figured that they could make bank if they just reused the shelves and the fixtures and opened their own place for secondhand books and knickknacks and shit.  There was a little coffee shop space on the first floor, and since they were perpetually understaffed because they’d hired a grand total of about three desperate kids, Ed was constantly getting shuffled over from the register to the kiosk and learning how to pull an espresso shot on the fly.  It worked out for the best in the long run, given that the experience definitely helped him get the barista job—but… The point was, the place was kind of a disaster, somewhat redeemed by the simple fact that it was the only damn bookstore on the whole downtown stretch.

The other advantage was that, because of their incredible inability to staff the store properly at any time, ever, Ed could pretty much ask for the hours he wanted, and they were always available.  He usually just sort of penned himself in on the schedule around his classes and his lab time; and they were always glad to have him and scrounging to fill the gaps; and the pay wasn’t total shit; and he got to take home pastries at the end of the day relatively regularly, so Al always got a nice breakfast.

One Thursday night, when he’d been working there for just about four months, he was shelving a crap-ton of textbooks they’d gotten dirt-cheap from a publisher that was going out of business and marked up halfway to hell.  The Reynolds were good at that shit; they were born and bred scavengers no matter how nice they dressed.  They mostly knew it, too, and Ed kind of admired their weird sort of finesse about it.

In any case, he was in the history section with his arms full of huge-ass hardcover tomes, and his shoulder was starting to throb, but he was pretty sure the Reynolds dodged their workman’s comp shit semi-illegally so that they’d pay less taxes, and he was thinking about the homework he still had for tomorrow when he got home.

So when someone said “Excuse me” in a weirdly kind of nice voice—smooth, _smooth_ voice; liquid, like ink more than honey—he just about jumped out of his skin.

“Sorry,” he managed, and then the guy—whose hair was even inkier than his voice, and fell in this incredible whip of a ponytail; and who had the most startling stormcloud blue-gray eyes that Ed had ever seen—said “No, I’m sorry; can I help you with—”

That was when the balance tipped, and Ed dropped the textbooks all over the floor.

“ _Crap_ ,” he said, crouching, and the guy knelt to help him, and he said, “Don’t worry, I got it, it’s fine,” and the guy said “No, no, I insist,” and then their hands kept meeting over books, and Ed blushed scarlet, and the guy gave him this smile like a satisfied snake.

For a genius, Ed was about the slowest learner of anyone he fucking knew.

But _God_ , if that red flag didn’t look just a little like a blanket.

He cleared his throat and got to his feet with the books, managed a “Thank you,” and then choked out a “Can I help you find anything today?”

“I hope so,” the guy said.  “I’m looking for anything you might have on the natural sciences.”

“Sure thing,” Ed said.  He put the evil fucking history books down on one of the display tables.  “Sciences are right over here.  Any discipline in particular?”

The guy was looking at Ed’s free lanyard from the biochem department’s Christmas party, which he’d hung his employee badge on.  “How terribly fortunate that I’ve stumbled upon someone who actually knows what they’re talking about,” he said.  “Can you recommend me anything specific to organic chemistry?”

The way the guy’s eyes kept lingering on his and then darting down along the lines of his face—then to the triangle of throat and collarbones where the first few buttons of his black Oxford were open—then—further down than that—

Ed could be kind of oblivious, but he wasn’t _stupid_.

“Well,” he said, fumbling for the words, which were tumbling out of his grasp just like those fucking history books.  “I mean, I—sort of.”

The guy just smiled again.

Store policy-slash-tradition dictated that Ed was supposed to stay on the floor and send the customer off with his pile of science literature, and somebody else would check him out at the register.  There was a weird miasmatic sort of feeling rising in Ed’s chest about it—a strange combination of disappointment and relief.

He had to shake it off.  Fucking history books weren’t gonna shelve themselves, and his problem sets weren’t gonna do themselves, and his life wasn’t going to keep chugging along unless he fucking pushed it every inch of the way.

He latched his eyes onto the textbooks’ covers and didn’t watch the guy walk off towards the stairs.

  


* * *

  


On Saturday—as with practically every Saturday—Ed was stationed at the register, in the midst of what he and Dolch had unofficially named the Dawn-to-Dusk Murder Shift, though they abbreviated it to DDMS in front of the Reynolds.  Dolch was the one who ended up helping him get the Has Beans job later on, because he and Marta went way back, and had apparently, like, dated once back when they were in high school, before she realized she wasn’t really into guys at _all_.  Dolch was very specific on that, like Ed would have accused him of not being man enough or some shit when Ed had about the single least heterosexual love life track record of anyone he knew.

Anyway, they were on DDMS, and it was ten in the morning or something, and Ed was stickering the shit out of some books and trying not to hear the intercom music, and Dolch elbowed him in the ribs.  Not gently.  Dolch had what Al had once called “occasional enthusiasm-related boundary confusion”.

“That guy was in here yesterday,” Dolch said.  “He was looking for you.”

Ed knew who it was before he glanced over.  The guy was really—striking.  Not, like, damn-I’d-tap-that-fine-piece-of-ass-if-I-didn’t-think-I’d-burn-my-hand hot, but attractive.  Like a magnet.  Sort of captivating.  Something about the ease of his stride and the casual slant of his shoulders—something about the hooded eyes and the thin, almost-caustic smile.  Something so calm and disaffected that it made just the concept of garnering his interest seem… challenging.  Exciting.  Addictive.

Ed just sort of wanted to _affect_ him, was all.

Maybe he didn’t think all that right at the start.  Maybe it was way simpler than that, and he was just projecting backwards, with the perspective that time and a hell of a lot of thought had lent him.

The guy was good-looking, and he was looking at _Ed_.  In the miserable, toxic wake of how Greg had replaced him with more convenient bodies—in the wash of bitter self-loathing and carved-out loneliness; in the poisonous fury at the betrayal and the pathetic collapse of the defeat—that felt… kind of… nice.  Kind of… promising.  Like maybe he wasn’t just fucking trash to be crumpled up and tossed out after all; like maybe people might not hate looking at him; like maybe there was hope for him offering his heart to someone and coming away with anything other than heel prints on it by the end.  Like at least he wasn’t _everybody’s_ last resort.  Like someone might want him, _only_ him.  Like someone might appreciate the sight of him enough to size him up in his stupid bookstore-peon quasi-uniform.

He wanted to be wanted.  He wanted to be _loved_ , for fuck’s sake—cherished and cooed over, sure, fine; he just wanted to be _listened_ to; he wanted to be held tight and kissed softly when he was so fucking worn out he couldn’t stand.  Al couldn’t give him that.  Al was stuck with him, anyway, and it was the best kind of necessary codependence anybody could’ve imagined, but Al’s affection for him was a given.  It was owed, and he gave back every iota that he got.

From somebody _else_ , though—

From somebody who wanted to see him happy and also wanted to get him naked—

Just—

Was it too much to ask?  Was that his fucking problem?  Was he demanding too much from the indifferent universe, and that was why it kept fucking slapping him down?

Maybe he needed to learn some damn humility and teach himself some gratitude, and… and something good might come his way eventually.  Right?  It was stupid to try to hurry it, and he didn’t _deserve_ anything; he didn’t have a right to any of his stupid, hazy-warm little fantasies; people were dying in droves in countries he couldn’t pin on a map, and his _mother_ had died not much older than he was now.  Life was not fair; the world was not kind; anyone who couldn’t cope with that was a child.

He’d be fine.

He’d get through it, like he always did.

He looked away from the guy in the store even though Dolch elbowed him again, even less-subtly this time.  He looked down at the register keys and curled his hands into fists on the counter and didn’t fucking beg for the attention.

That was a step in the right direction, wasn’t it?

…except.

Except that the guy came in again on Sunday afternoon, and Ed didn’t have the DDMS warning system digging a pointy joint into his ribs—he just looked up from the register, and the guy was standing there, smiling at him.

His breath stuck, and his heart jittered hard and wouldn’t stay still no matter how carefully he tried to breathe.

“Hi,” he said, fighting to keep his voice level, and maybe it was a war he’d lose, but so far— “Finding everything okay?”

“Nearly everything,” the guy said.  “Could I trouble you for your educated opinion?”

He had two genetics books—a newer and an older—with contradictory passages on the same topic.

Well, shit, Ed hadn’t sacrificed all these years of his life and hours of sleep for nothing, right?  He pushed past the weird fluttery sensation in his stomach—not butterflies, really, unless butterflies had gotten a whole lot stickier since he was a kid—and started in on how the reason the older book was still in print was that it was just better-researched, honestly, and more reputable all around.  Conventional wisdom was starting to favor the newer results just because people were loud about them, but that was basically a freaking myth—and if you looked at the footnotes about the study they were citing, their sample size was dangerously small, and if that didn’t turn you off of their results, their smarmy use of certainty words instead of qualifiers was another thing, and…

And the guy was just—looking at him.

“Thank you,” he said.  “That’s very useful.”

“Sure,” Ed said.

The guy inclined his head just slightly towards Ed’s badge.  “May I call you Edward?”

Fuckin’ too late now.  “Ed’s okay.”

“Ed, then,” the guy said.  “I think I’d like to buy this one.”  He laid one long-fingered hand on Ed’s pick.  “And do you know if there’s going to be anyone serving over in the coffee shop soon?  There really isn’t anything more pleasant than a cup of coffee and some time to read.”

Ed couldn’t argue with that.  He attempted to convince their ornery fucking scanner—which somebody, he suspected Dolch, had Sharpied little eyes on, because it looked like a brontosaurus’s head and neck—to read the barcode.  “I can run over there and do that for you.  Gotta check you out separately, though—sorry.  You’re looking at $22.58 here.”

“Delightful,” the guy said, and his hands were _really_ something; Ed couldn’t help watching the way he flipped through the bills in his wallet to pull out thirty dollars in cash.

He met Ed’s eyes the whole time as he handed them over, and then again as Ed counted the change out into the palm of his hand.  It was—what?  What the fuck was it?  Ed was getting goosebumps, and his blood was running _so_ hot, and he could hear his heartbeat resonating back against the walls of his skull.

“Righto,” he said, offering up the receipt.  The guy plucked it out of his fingers so fucking deliberately, eyes on him, eyes _always_ on him— “If you wanna just follow me… What can I get going for you over at the café?”

“Just coffee,” the guy said as Ed led the way over.  “Black.”

“You bet,” Ed said, slipping back behind the counter and throwing an apron on.  He washed his hands and tried not to think about the fact that the towel by the sink had to be a bacterial bar mitzvah after hanging there slightly damp for God-only-knew-how-long.  “You mind if I make a new pot?  It’ll take a little while, but I dunno how long this’s been sitting here.”

“Not at all,” the guy said, settling at the closest little wooden table and stretching out his legs.  He laid one ankle across the other and folded his hands on top of the book, and then he just… watched.  “That’s very kind of you.”

Ed kind of wanted to say _Well, no, I get paid for this shit_ , but he couldn’t afford to lose this job.  “No problem.  It’ll be just a minute.”

“Take your time,” the guy said, and the elegant angles of his body did something funny to Ed’s throat.

  


* * *

  


Dolch’s elbow reunited with Ed’s ribcage Tuesday night.  “Your guy’s back.”

“He’s not _my_ guy,” Ed said.

“Dude,” Dolch said.  “He was in here yesterday, ‘Might I inquire’-ing if you were around.”

Just as Ed was about to say _Him looking at me like spiders look at flies does not make him ‘mine’_ , the guy pushed the front doors open and strode on through.

“Hi,” Ed said.  “How are you tonight?”

“Excellent,” the guy said.  His eyes flicked briefly to Dolch, but you could tell that everything but Ed was window-dressing, and he didn’t give a shit.  “And you?”

“Doin’ all right,” Ed said, which was more or less the case.  “Anything I can help you find?”

“Do you carry anything on neurology?” the guy asked.

Ed gave him a smile and turned to the computer to click into the inventory.  “Let’s find out.”

  


* * *

  


Every night that week that Ed was working, the guy came in and asked for a science book—then cracked it open and started asking seriously intelligent questions.  Ed went back and forth trying to figure out what the game was—did he _really_ just want someone to talk obscure knowledge trivia with, or was it something… other… than that?

Either way, the dude was spending a small fucking fortune on books—the technical shit wasn’t cheap, and he was getting something brand-new every other day.  Either he had a hell of a lot of money to burn, or he was seriously desperate for… whatever it was that he wanted.  Whatever he was here for, over and over and over again.

He was sort of nice to talk to, though, weirdly enough.  At first it was just that Ed didn’t have a choice except to do the polite-customer-conversation-small-talk thing, but then it was—better than that.  The science stuff was really good, because the guy was _smart_ , not to mention articulate as hell.  He really got it, which was more than you could say for most people who tried to dabble in just about every scientific discipline that was making headlines these days.  And he was curious, too, and not a big douchebag about it when he didn’t know something—he was genuinely interested in learning about shit.  Ed liked that.  Kind of a lot.

And—more and more and more—it seemed like he was genuinely interested in _Ed_.  Not just in eyeballing him from the stationery section anymore, either; he’d… ask questions.  Good questions, pleasant questions—how Ed’s day was going, what he was studying, what had made him pick this field, this school (“because of course you must have had all of them groveling at your feet, with a mind like yours”), this part of town—

And Ed had said something about Al somewhere, and something about his car, and a couple things about where he grew up, and it was only towards the end of the week that he realized—with a feeling like surfacing from warm water—that he didn’t know the first fucking thing about this guy.

On Friday night, the guy came in a few minutes before eight.  It was starting to get kind of… exciting, waiting for him, wondering what topic he’d be interested in next.  For bonus points, he was practically singlehandedly keeping this place in business.

By eight-fifteen, they’d found him a collection of transcripts of lectures at an interdisciplinary engineering conference, which they took back down to the registers so Ed could ring him up.

“When does your shift end tonight?” the guy asked, handing over cash.

“Ten,” Ed said as he took it.

“Excellent,” the guy said.  He said that a lot.  But not in a Wayne’s World way at all.  “Can I buy you a drink afterwards?”

Ed was halfway through counting change, and his mind ground to a full and complete stop, with hands and arms flailing furiously outside of the ride.  “What?”

“After your shift,” the guy said calmly, “would you meet me at the Ace of Spades so that I can buy you a drink?”

Ed swallowed.  He looked at the money in his hand, then the money in the drawer, trying to remember how much switching around he still had to do between them.  Had the guy given him two twenties, or a fifty?  Just as pertinently, what the fucking fuck was going on?

“Um,” he said.  “S-sure.  Yeah.”  A furtive glance confirmed that the guy had his thin, pleased smile firmly in place, and heat rushed into Ed’s cheeks.  “It’ll—take me a couple minutes to get there.  You’d be waiting a while.”

“I don’t mind,” the guy said.

Ed tried out a grin, aiming for carefree and roguish and adventurous or some shit.  “Okay.  Cool.”

“Fifteen forty-seven,” the guy said.

Ed blinked.

“My change,” the guy said.  “It’s fifteen forty-seven.”  The smile was back.  “You’re really very fetching when you’re flustered.”

That turned Ed’s face the color and temperature of marinara sauce in point-two seconds flat.  “I—oh, God.  Uh.  Thanks.  Um.  Here.”

The guy laughed—a soft, light, melodious kind of a sound.  Smooth and understated and utterly entrancing, like everything about him.  He took his change, and his fingertips grazed Ed’s way more than was remotely necessary, and his eyes never left Ed’s face.  “Yes, quite like that.”

Was Ed an attention whore for liking this?  Was he vain for feeling—what?  Flattered?  _Validated_?

Shit.

“Jeez,” he said, fumbling to tear the guy’s receipt off without shredding the fucking thing.  “Um—okay.  I’ll head over there at ten, I guess.  Um.  You gonna be inside, or…?”

It wasn’t exactly a dive bar, but all bars sort of made Ed antsy, so he wasn’t exactly thrilled about the idea of wandering in alone.

Maybe that was a good thing—a good sign.  Maybe he needed to shake his life the fuck up, change something, rework and rewrite and rebuild and do something different to jar himself out of this rut and feel like a human fucking being again.

“Why don’t I give you my cell number?” the guy said.  “I can put it into your phone, if you like.”

Ed wasn’t sure he liked.  He was sure, however, that this was gonna get awkward as shit if he didn’t hand his phone over, and he didn’t want to fuck it up this time; somebody was actively giving a shit about him for once, and it felt _nice_ , and…

“Sure,” he said.  He dragged it out of his pocket, tapped in his passcode, and then pushed it across the counter.

“Excellent,” the guy said.  His gaze dipped, reluctantly it seemed, from Ed’s face to the phone screen.  Unbelievable hands.  Unbelievable fingers.  “Call if you’re having trouble finding me, and then you can just stay put until I get there, hm?”

He pushed the phone back, and his eyes lifted slow, slow, slow until they latched onto Ed’s again.

“Yeah,” Ed managed.  “Okay.”

“Perfect,” the guy said.  He tucked his receipt into the front cover of the book.  “I’ll see you soon, then.”

“Yeah,” Ed said again.

He watched the guy walk out the front doors and wondered what in the ever-loving fuck he thought he was doing.

…the dude had a pretty great ass, though.

  


* * *

  


Two hours later, Ed was standing on the sidewalk in front of Ace of Spades.  His shoulder ached like hell from vacuuming upstairs as fast as humanly possible after close, and his head was throbbing a little bit on the off-beats of the nerve pain, apparently just for shits and giggles.

Ed liked alcohol.  He liked taking the easy way out every now and then; he liked having a surefire recipe for filing the edge off of everything.  He liked tripping his stupid brain in mid-frantic-scurry and forcing it to shut up.  He liked how it made him funnier—made _everything_ funnier—and how the world felt smaller and a little less cold when he had a stomach full of bubbles and a sticky-sweet film over the cruelest parts of his own fucking intellect.

Ed didn’t like bars.

He was pretty sure it was the concept more than the actual experience that made him so fucking leery that the doors of the Ace looked like a black hole right that second.  He just… didn’t like the noise, didn’t like the too-loud laughter and the bad music and the shouted conversations that got muddier and muddier the more that people drank.  He didn’t like the hazy eyes and the sharp elbows; he didn’t like the sense he always got that he was being watched from a dark corner by somebody who’d drowned their own inhibitions an hour ago.  He didn’t like thinking about what people were capable of when they’d had too much.  He didn’t like being in the middle of all that, in a wash of lost control, trying to preserve himself— _protect_ himself—when his own faculties were numbed to shit the second he started to participate in the reason he was there.

Point was, he did his drinking at home.  Bars made his skin crawl; bars made him feel small and lost and stupid and vulnerable and desperate.  He couldn’t let himself be any of those things; all the shit he’d built up brick by brick would fucking crumble if he dropped his guard for a second.

Except… here he was anyway, ’cause some fucking stranger with nice hands and nice hair had smiled and asked.

Fuck.

He closed his eyes for a second, listening to the rattle of the leaves in the slight wind and the draw of his own breath into his lungs.  It was just a building.  It was just a building full of people, and he didn’t _have_ to drink anything, and he didn’t owe anybody in there a goddamn thing.  And he could kick any of their asses even if he’d had, like, a whole fifth of whiskey; they weren’t shit.

For fuck’s sake.  He could do this.  He owed it to himself to try—owed it to his pride and all the goddamn Everests he’d scaled to get here; to the people who supported him all the way; and to the maybe-half-a-chance at something awesome waiting for him just inside.

He squared his shoulders, dragged in a breath, let it out slow, and opened the door.

The cacophony of intoxicated chaos steamrolled him right off the bat, but he soldiered through it.  He had to be cool.  He had to be fucking cool; maybe this guy was into scientists, but nobody liked a loser.

Speaking of the guy, Ed’s quick and possibly slightly distressed search of the main barroom the instant he stepped in revealed no tall figure with a crisp white shirt and a brain-shorting fall of stark black hair.  Where the fuck was he?  Had he just set Ed up for a small and pointless prank or some shit?  Was that what this was?

He had to play cool.  If he just played fucking cool, he’d be fine; he’d be bulletproof—untouchable.

He sized up the room as he started towards the bar, fishing his phone out of his pocket again—it was, apparently, too much to hope for a text message telling him where the mystery guy was.

_Although_ —speaking of, what the hell had he called himself when he was adding himself as a contact in Ed’s phone?

That was good; that gave him something to do with his hands.  He thumbed his way down through the admittedly pretty fucking short list—the only reason there was any scrolling to do at all was that all the other lab members were in there, by order of Izumi—and kept one eye on the fluid shifting of the people on all sides.

There was one entry he’d never seen before: Soph Kimblee.  What the hell kind of a name was that?

…then again, Ed had been told on more than one occasion that his own damn name sounded fake.  And he’d gotten a hell of a lot of seriously unwanted attention for it right after _Twilight_ came out.

There was an open segment of the bar, and he picked the seat exactly in the middle of it—buffer zone.  Never hurt.

The bartender was a big guy with a broad forehead and broader forearms, which were blanketed in tats.  He came over and raised an eyebrow.

Play it fucking cool; be ice; be _Arctic_ —

“Your dragon is totally kickass,” Ed said, pointing at the one coiling downward from the guy’s elbow, with its head on his wrist so that the flames from its mouth could shoot out over the back of his hand.

“Thanks,” the guy said.  “What can I get you?”

“Can I have a Coke for now?” Ed asked.  “I’m—waiting for somebody.”

“Sure,” the guy said.  “Two-fifty.  Still need ID if you’re gonna sit there, though.”

Ed put his phone down on the driest part of the countertop in front of him and dug for his wallet.  “Here.”  Judiciously, he didn’t add the long rant about markups on diluted soda syrup and shit.  Al probably knew that one by heart by now.

The bartender returned his driver’s license in favor of taking his three bucks, slipping off towards the register.  Ed started a text to the new number.

_hey i’m here can’t find you sorry_

He looked at it for a minute.  That was the fucking beautiful thing about text messages—you could think about what you wanted to say for as long as you liked before you sent the damn thing.  No such luck on a phone call; real time required you to generate coherent responses on the fly.  Plus you could manually lower yourself on someone’s list of priorities if you sent a text—texts weren’t urgent in the same way as an incoming call, and that took even more of the pressure off.

The barkeep brought him a glass of Coke and a coaster.  After five long, time-killing sips on the straw, a text to Al that said nothing more or less than _hi i’m at ace of spades with a guy from work don’t wait up but just in case i’m not back tomorrow morning call the cops love you kid <3_, Ed sighed inwardly, navigated back to the newly-added number, and picked the button to dial it this time.

His throat went kind of dry, and his hands went kind of clammy, and he clutched the phone to his ear and chewed on his straw, scouring the room all the while.  There weren’t exactly a whole lot of places to fucking _hide_ —

The line caught on the third ring.

“Hello,” the guy’s voice said, buttery as hell.

“It’s me,” Ed managed.  “Ed.  From the bookstore.”

“Wonderful,” the guy said.

Uh… okay.  “I’m here,” Ed said.  “I’m on the right side of the bar.”

“I see you,” the guy’s voice said.

Ed twisted around, and—sure enough—the guy was standing off on the far side of the room directly behind him, lowering his phone with a slow smile and a small wave.

Why the fuck was Ed so fucking awkward _all the time_?  What was it that other people did to fill the time gap between making eye contact and coming into earshot?  Did it just not bother them?  Was awkwardness just something you had to opt into by acknowledging its action potential?

More likely Ed was just—wired wrong.  He always had been; odds were this wasn’t any different.

“Hope you haven’t been waiting long,” the guy— _Soph_ —said, right as he got close enough to hear, just as Ed was starting to part his lips to blurt out something probably-stupid.  The guy settled on the bar stool on Ed’s right and spread one hand on the bar.  “What’s your poison?”

“I’m okay,” Ed said, gesturing with his elbow to his Coke.  It was a fucking miracle that he managed not to knock the damn thing over for once.

“Nonsense,” the guy said.  “My treat.”

Ed tried at a genial kind of smile.  “It’s really okay.”

The guy’s other hand rose to brush something off of Ed’s shoulder—a touch so light it barely registered, and goosebumps chased Ed’s pulse all the way down his arm.  “Come on.  I insist.”

Soph Kimblee’s eyes were somehow bright and amused and fucking intense at the same time, and it made Ed’s stomach clench, and maybe… maybe he did just need to liquor himself up enough to relax, right?  “I—okay.  I’m already started on Coke; they can just put rum in the next one.”

The guy smiled and then half-turned to signal to the bartender with the rad tattoo, who dutifully returned.  “Could you bring a rum and Coke for this charming young man—” Ed flushed hot and red to the very fucking tips of his fucking ears; didn’t this guy know they were in fucking _public_?  “—and a vodka martini?  Belvedere, if you’d be so kind.”

Ed waited for the deluge of homophobic rage, but it… never arrived.  The bartender just sort of nodded and said “You want me to start a tab?”

“Please,” the guy said—and Ed was such a moron; he had a _name_.

Ed cleared his throat as soon as the bartender moved away.  “So is… Is ‘Soph’ short for something?”

“Sophocles,” the guy said, smiling again.

“Fancy,” Ed said, trying to grin back.  “You sure you can slum it with somebody named like me?”

Soph’s smile curved higher.  “You have a king’s name,” he said, “and a prince’s aspect.  What else could I ask for?”

Ed’s face was on fire again.  You’d think he’d be used to it by now, but it was a mortifying shock every single goddamn fucking time.

“That,” Soph said, narrow smile parting for a gleam of teeth as he lifted his hand and touched two fingertips to Ed’s flaming cheek.  “That is really rather beautiful.”

Naturally, the blaze under Ed’s skin escalated to three-alarm status at that.  “Wh—at?”

Soph laughed, low and quiet, and his eyes glittered, and his fingertips traced down to Ed’s jaw.  “You have such an expressive face.  Surprise flatters you enormously.”

Ed wasn’t sure he would’ve called it surprise so much as—what?  It wasn’t _embarrassment_ , really; it wasn’t shame.  He didn’t… really… know… what it was.  Maybe there wasn’t a word for it.  It was sort of a mush-pot of being pleased at the compliments without actually believing them at all, and a hyper-awareness of all the people around them, and a draw to the increasing allure of Soph’s thin little smile—the man looked like he could do amazing things with that mouth.

The rush of heart-pounding adrenaline at _that_ thought definitely swirled some shame in with the endorphins.  Apparently Ed was gunning for sex before they’d even had a fucking drink.  Edward ‘Self-Respect’ Elric; that was him.

Their drinks clinked down on the counter, and Ed just about jumped out of his skin as the bartender’s shadow fell across them.  Soph’s hand dropped gracefully away from his face, which sort of left his cheek tingling, like the fingerprints had left a mark—a brand—and everyone would know, now, who he belonged to.

That shouldn’t have been such a good thought—such a comforting thought.  Being beholden to someone.  Belonging; _being_ someone’s belonging.  Being owned; being claimed; being wanted, badly.  But it was.  He was just so fucking _desperate_.

Fuck.

Whatever—he was playing it cool.  He was dry ice on a winter evening, and he was doing okay so far, and he was going to get through this, and it was fine.

So they… talked.  Him and Soph.  Soph had a way of tilting his head down just a little and looking up through his lashes, with his eyelids kind of low, and that should’ve looked lazy, but it was so fucking focused that it made Ed’s guts wobble in a seriously disconcerting way.  The guy was still just so good to talk to—they went on about science for ages, and then Ed asked what Soph did for a living if advanced science discussions were his fucking _hobby_ , and Soph said something about weapons tech, which was a little unsettling, but Ed had lab-friends who did things to test animals that would make most people vomit, so he tried not to judge.

There were a lot of drinks.  Soph just kept—making this really graceful gesture with his hand, and the bartender would come and sweep away Ed’s empty glass and set down a new one, and Ed knew his words were starting to blur together at the edges a little bit, and he was starting to laugh a little too easily.  He knew he should stop, but it felt _nice_ —not thinking anything; not _over-_ thinking anything; just… having fun.  With a guy he’d just met, who kept smiling at him and touching his face and his arm and his hand and—once—his _neck_ , and he probably shivered, and that should’ve been embarrassing as shit, but he just felt… floaty.  Calm.  Good.

Next thing he remembered, they were outside, and the streetlamps were bobbing around like fucking fairy lights—like will-o’-the-wisps—and he was saying “Shit, shit, I’m sorry, I had too much, I—?”, and then there was an arm around his shoulders.

Then his shoulders were against a wall—brick?—and it was dark, and then it was even darker because someone was kissing him, and he couldn’t see anything around them; there was a curtain of thick, dark hair, and he buried his fingers in it.

It was a _good_ kiss, too—a kiss like a velvet dream; like a river of dark chocolate flooding its banks; like the mathematical average of heaven and hell, and he whimpered into it, and a beautiful voice laughed softly.

“You have had a bit too much, haven’t you?” it asked, and things were sort of tilting, and he wondered how many hours he had left before his digestive system would stage the full-scale rebellion.  What time was it, anyway?

“Told my brother I’d get home,” he forced out—or something like it, something with words; maybe it was those words.  “C’n you—I could—taxi, or—”

“Nonsense,” the lovely voice said.  “I’ll take you.  Come along.”

Like he could do much of fucking anything.

The arm was around him again, and even though his feet kept trying to tangle up and hurl him to the spinning sidewalk, somehow it supported him until he was looking at his distorted reflection in the shiny window of a car.  The door was opened, and then he was guided down onto a really comfortable leather seat, and then he started fumbling for the seatbelt at the same time that a much more dextrous pair of hands reached for it, and they pushed his aside.

“Let me,” the voice said, and buckled him in, and then he was being kissed again, and he tried to rise up into it, but the shoulder-belt was sort of cutting into his throat.  The one in his car was so frayed on the edge that it didn’t hurt anymore even when it hit him at an angle like that, and he shouldn’t’ve been thinking about seatbelts while he was kissing someone anyway; that was _rude_.

He didn’t want to be rude.  He wanted to be lovable.

When the kiss receded, he tried to say so, but he heard it starting to come out in an incoherent mumble of backwards syllables and gave up partway through.

The door closed, and then the door on the other side opened, and then the car bounced just slightly—but enough to jar Ed’s nausea from a creeping-lurking thing into a _predator_ —and then the engine roared too loud, and then…

Somehow he was letting himself into the lobby of their apartment building with his first key, and the second one kept swimming in his vision, and he staggered over to the elevator and managed to hit the up button on his third try.  Was he alone again?  He tried to turn around and check, and he almost fell on his ass; somehow his fucked-up reflexes resulted in an arm against the wall that steadied him a little.  The elevator _ding_ ed real loud and then shuddered open, and he glared down at his feet and tried to _make_ them carry him inside.

There was a sort of handrail-bar-thing on the wall, which he clung to while the elevator car lurched up and up and up to the eighth floor, then parted its doors again so that he could stumble out into the hallway.  He seemed to be good at the stumbling thing, or at least good at gathering and maintaining momentum, judging by the fact that he stumbled out of the elevator and all the way across the hall and collided with the opposite wall at a fairly impressive speed.

What the fuck time was it?  He’d gotten off work at… ten, right?  He couldn’t’ve started drinking before ten thirty, after all that fucking around with his phone that he’d done before he’d even gotten to the rum.  It had to be, what?  One?  Two?  Didn’t they close the bars at two?  Was that why they’d left?  He couldn’t remember; either everything was swaying around him, or he was swaying, and everything else was staying obnoxiously still.

The math was vaguely comforting, though.  Made him feel a tiny bit less like a dumbass piece of shit gallumphing down the hall at fuck-knows-o’-clock, probably about to garner some fucking complaints from the fucking neighbors that would make Al get all upset and shit, and—

And—

Where were his keys?

It was a miracle that their apartment was the one at the end of the hall, because he couldn’t seem to get his eyes to understand the numbers on the doors.  Which was kind of ironic, given that the numbers in his head were having a stabilizing influence.  He sort of wanted to laugh about that, but he had a weird premonition that if he opened his mouth for too long, he was gonna barf.

His stumble took him to the door—or, more specifically, _into_ the door, as he lost his balance and sort of banged into it, and his whole fucking arm surged with violent pins-and-needles agony at the impact on his elbow, at which point he sagged down to the floor to cradle his forearm to his chest and make mournful noises to himself.

…it seemed like a pretty good idea at the time.

He really only had time for two distinct noises (sort of a “ _Mrrrr_ ” and then a “ _Hnnuu_ ”, each masterpieces in their own right) before the door opened, and he tipped over and ended up sprawled over the threshold, arm clutched beneath him.

“Ow,” he said.

“Oh, gosh,” Al said in a high voice.  Because of course Al was waiting up for him, even though Ed had told him not to; of _course_ he was; he always did; he got so worried, and Ed was such a shitty brother that he kept giving Al _reasons_ to worry, and it was probably affecting Al’s sleep and his studies and his beautiful soul, and…

Ed might have been crying a little.

“Sweet mother of pearl,” Al said.  His hands were on Ed’s shoulder, and the blurry jeans-colored things in front of Ed’s face might have been his knees.  “Brother—are you—oh, _gosh_ , Ed, you smell like a _liquor store_.”

“I feel like one,” Ed said.

“What?” Al said.  “Um—never mind.  Brother—c’mon, here, we’ll just—c’mon, you can sleep on the couch; we’ll get you a bucket.  How are you feeling?”

“Gross,” Ed said.

“I’m shocked,” Al said.  “Easy—you’re okay, c’mon, use your _feet_ , Brother—all right, here we go—”

Somehow, he ended up collapsed on the couch, which he had to admit was significantly more comfortable than the floor of their entryway.

“I’m sorry,” he managed to get out.  “I’m so sorry, Al, I’m so _sorry_ —I’m such a piece of shit; I can’t even go out for a drink without getting fucked up and then fucking _you_ over even though you have nothing to do with it, and I’m the worst brother ever, and you hate me, and I’m so _sorry_ , Al, I love you, I’m so fucking sorry, I—”

Al put a hand over his mouth, which he noticed after a few of the words got even more mangled than their predecessors on their way off his tongue.

“Hush up,” Al said.  “Gosh, Ed, you… gosh.  I’m not mad, okay?  I’m just worried about you.  This isn’t like you, and you must’ve had a _lot_ if you’re this… messed up, and—and that’s scary, but we’re going to get through it, okay?  You and me.  Like always.  It’s going to be fine, Brother.  You don’t have to be sorry; there’s nothing to be sorry about.  I love you, too.”  He took his hand away slowly.  “Okay?”

“You won’t love me anymore if I barf on you,” Ed said, feeling the truth of the statement resonate though every miserable bone in his miserable body.

“Oh, Brother,” Al said with more than a hint of a sigh—the sigh of a good person giving up on a bad one at long, long last.  “Do you think you’re up to drinking some water?”

“I think I’m gonna puke up my lungs,” Ed said.

“That doesn’t really answer the question, but…”

“Bucket,” Ed said weakly.

Al handed it to him, and Ed filled it, and…

Well, that sucked.

But then he passed out while Al was stroking his hair a lot and murmuring a little, and that sucked much less.

  


* * *

  


The next morning, however, sucked _heinously_.

“I’m dying,” Ed said.  “ _Dying_.”

“You should call in sick to work,” Al said.

“Can’t,” Ed said.  “Murder shift.  Dolch’ll kill me if I bail.”

“You’ve had four hours of sleep and twice that many Advil,” Al said.  “Dolch can’t kill you if you actually die.”

“They don’t have anybody else,” Ed said.  “Can’t miss shifts.”  He could put his head down on the table for a moment, though.  Just a second.  “ _Fuck_.”

“Brother,” Al said in his Worried Voice—or one of his Worried Voices, anyway, since he had, like, twelve.  “I really don’t think you should go i—”

“Got to,” Ed said.

And if it was partly because he just—was really, _really_ hoping to see Soph again—

Well—

Was that a fucking crime?

  


* * *

  


“Dude,” Dolch said when Ed staggered in two minutes before nine.  “You look like _shit_.”

“Thanks,” Ed said through the pounding of his fucking brain, which was not unlike a taiko drumming performance on crack.  “I’m so fucking glad I can always count on unconditional support from my compassionate fucking friends.”

Dolch laughed, which hurt even more.  Not in an emotional way; just for Ed’s headache.  “Are you hungover?”

“Maybe,” Ed said.  He’d snuck the entire bottle of Advil into his bag, which Al would kill him for if he knew; Al had this thing about preserving Ed’s liver.  Not in formaldehyde, or anything; he just thought Ed was going to destroy it with all of the painkillers and caffeine.

Like Ed had a fucking choice—his options were to coddle his liver; or to be awake and not in pain all the fucking time.  Kind of a no-brainer even when your brain was staging some French Revolution-caliber revolts and shit.

“Dude,” Dolch said.  “Did you go out last night?  You suck.  You never go out with _us_.”

_That’s because you’re friends with Greg,_ Ed did not say, _and if he showed up, and I was drunk, I swear to God, I don’t know if I’d deck him or try to get him to take me back.  And I don’t fuckin’ wanna know._

He snagged the key and went to go unlock the front doors.  “It was a one-time thing.”

“I get it,” Dolch said in an admittedly pretty hilarious overstated fake-sad voice.  “You just don’t _like_ me.  After everything we’ve been through… that time those six different pigeons got into the store at once—” That had been an interesting day.  “—and the lady who tried to assault you because we didn’t have the right gospel CD—” That, too.  “—and the guy who filed a complaint because I said ‘What the hell’ when he spilled his coffee all over me—” That had been kind of rough; Dolch had almost gotten fired over it until Ed had convinced the Reynolds to watch the security camera footage and see it for themselves.  “Apparently, that doesn’t mean anything to you anymore.”

“Yeah,” Ed said, dragging some of their standing signs out into the proper places from where he’d relocated them to vacuum last night.  “Sorry.  Our friendship is meaningless.  I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.”

Dolch rolled his eyes so hard it was a wonder they didn’t fall out of his head and get squished underfoot.  “Wow.  Tell me how you really feel, Elric.”

Ed went back to the Island of Lost Registers to fish his badge and shit out of his backpack and sling it on.  “No, it’s really just… I don’t… normally do that shit.  Not my thing.  It was just—that guy.”

He got sort of a warm, tingly, fluttery feeling in his stomach even saying it, which was about the single most disgusting thing that had ever happened to him over the course of his painfully unromantic life.  Also, it made the hangover nausea eight times worse.  Why did people even do this falling-in-love crap?

…oh.  Oh, God.  Was he—how could he even be _thinking_ that after just a couple—oh, _God_.

“Whoa,” Dolch was saying.  There was a hand waving in front of his eyes.  “Earth to Ed.  You mean your stalker-guy?”

“He’s not a stalker,” Ed said.  “He’s just—” _Aggressive.  Persistent.  Kind of maybe following me a little, sure, but whatever.  Really,_ really _hot._   “—interested.”

Dolch eyed him for a second.  “Okay, man,” he said.  “But… I mean, I know this is some straight-outta-Cosmo shit, but—don’t… settle.”

Ed stared at him.

Dolch looked ferociously embarrassed.  “I mean—it sort of seems like you… what the fuck ever, never mind.”

This was getting dangerously close to Feelings Talk for a conversation between two dudes, so Ed figured it was probably best to… not… press the issue.  At all.  Ever.

“Uh,” he said.  “How was your night?”

Dolch started going on about an informal Super Smash Thing tournament after that, so Ed figured he’d probably dodged the bullet.

  


* * *

  


Ed was helping a little girl who wanted a sparkly notebook—but not _too_ sparkly, and she only had ten dollars, and it needed to be a _good_ one, and why were the sparkly things always pink when there were so many other pretty colors too?—when he heard the rush of air of the front doors opening.  Right as he glanced up, Soph sauntered in—all sheer fucking elegance and fine slacks and stunning hair and gorgeous-sharp features with the slightest meaningful twist of his hips.

Ed’s mouth went dry.  Which wasn’t really that much of a problem, because he hadn’t had any valid answers for the little girl’s questions anyway, except for maybe a sort of bewildered “Patriarchy?”, and she probably didn’t know that that was the word for it yet.

He focused hard on the stationery shelf and picked out another candidate, which he presented to her.  He cleared his throat twice.  “How’s—this one?”

It was a sunny-sky sort of blue with a stylistic flower design on it in silver.

“I dunno,” the girl said.  She couldn’t have been more than seven; fuck her parents for ditching her here while they went off and did whatever they were doing.  It wasn’t that he felt like he was babysitting—this was clearly the kind of kid who knew how to entertain herself; and also the kind who had obviously been down this road before, and would shortly be picking up a Junie B. Jones book and sitting silently in a corner to read it until her parents deigned to retrieve her again.

It was the fact that nothing pissed Ed off like kids getting left on their own when their parents had every single goddamn necessary resource to look after them and just didn’t _want_ to.

Fucking nothing.

Anyway—just knowing that Soph was in the damn building was making his stomach flip and backflip and try out all-new pretzel shape designs, but that didn’t matter yet, because right now this little girl was the most important person in the world to him.

She was tilting the notebook back and forth so that the embossed silver would catch the light.

“It’s nice, I guess,” she said.  She looked at him, then at the rack.  “Well—what’s your favorite color?”

“Black,” Ed said.  “Or red.”

“’Kay,” the girl said, very seriously.  “You guys got a red one?  I want a red one.”

There was a small black Moleskine-type one that had red-edged pages, but it was higher up.  For once—for _once_ —Ed was the conversational participant with superior height coming to his advantage.

“How’s this?” he asked.  “It’s sorta red.”

Her face lit up—then fell just as fast as she turned it over.  “This costs _fifteen_ dollars.  I only got ten.”

“How about I get it for you,” Ed said before he could stop himself, “and use my discount, which’ll make it, like, twelve dollars, and then you can pay me back?”

She looked at him like he was a fucking angel sent down to save her—like there was not a goddamn thing about him that was wrong or backwards or broken.

You couldn’t put a price on that.

He rung her up with his discount, and swiped his credit card—he _had_ been thinking about buying that one, anyway, except for the fact that having nice notebooks in lab was like setting Michelin-star restaurant dishes in front of farm animals—and then took the ten-dollar bill she solemnly handed over.

“I owe you—” She had to stand on her toes to look at the register total.  “One dollar and twenty-four cents.”

“No problem,” Ed said.  “Just come by another time.  Whenever.”

She beamed at him, clutching the notebook to her chest.  “I’m gonna write a story about you.  One where you’re a superhero who saves the world.”

He grinned at her.  “Sounds awesome.  Let me know when it’s done.”

She flounced off looking happier than just about anybody he’d ever met, and that felt… frigging rad, actually.

Dolch was totally laughing at him.  “Man, chicks _dig_ you.  What’s your secret?”

Before Ed could say _Not being interested, I guess?_ , Soph sidled over to the counter from the café area, all dark eyes and meaningful smile.

“Hello, Ryan,” he said, gaze flickering momentarily to Dolch’s nametag.  Ed always forgot that Dolch had a first name.  It was kinda funny.  _Ryan_.  Whatever.  No time to snicker inwardly about it, because Soph’s attention was turning to him—and pinning him like a moth to a fucking board, right through the center of the chest.  “Hello, Ed.”

“Hey,” Ed managed with all the breath he could muster.  “Uh—” This sort of to Dolch, as much as he could tear his focus away.  “—you mind if I take my lunch?”

“Nope,” Dolch said.  “Go for it.”

Ed wasn’t sure what he would have done if Dolch had said anything else.

He flashed a thank-you grin and then turned to Soph, who had just been smiling at him the whole time.  It made his guts feel like snakes and live wires; made him feel like there were embers in his stomach, heat curling slowly up his throat.

“You wanna step outside?” he said through the smoke.

“Certainly,” Soph said.

Ed led him out the front doors but then around the side of the place; no point standing there by the discount racks trying not to be awkward while yuppie patrons browsed around and sh—

Soph pushed him up against the wall just hard enough that the stucco prickled hard against his shoulder-blades, and then kissed him until he couldn’t remember the last time breathing right had even been a thing.

His head was still banging from the hangover, and kind of throbbing from the impact with the wall, and spinning as he started to get oxygen-deprived—

But it was _good_ —it was _so_ good—he felt—fucking _awesome_ ; he felt like he’d stuck a flag on Kilimanjaro and lapped Usain Bolt while they were both out for a jog—giddy and breathless and weak in the knees, with his heart going like a mad drum leading him to the greatest fucking war—

Soph drew back enough to give him a long, slow inspection with those goddamn gorgeous eyes.

“Are you feeling badly?” he asked.  “You did go a bit overboard.”

Ed flushed hard and fast and hot.  That did not feel so awesome.  “Well—” _It was kind of your fault, unless Santa Claus bought me, like, eight fucking rum and cokes and then fucked off back up the chimney before I saw_.  “—I mean—”

“I’m not trying to be judgmental,” Soph said, laughing softly at his expression and tucking a little flip of hair behind his ear.  “You’re an adult, after all; you can make your own choices.  I was just concerned.  Perhaps it would be best if we didn’t make a habit of that.”

Sounded like judgment to Ed, but maybe he was reaching—maybe he was overthinking it.  He usually fucking did.

“Yeah,” he said.  “I mean—I don’t—do that—much at all.  Dolch was just giving me crap about it, actually; I’m kind of—kind of a lightweight, and I don’t really like crowds, an—”

Soph put an elegant finger to his lips.  “You don’t have to justify yourself to me.”

Ed’s racing heart staggered like it’d tripped over a hurdle halfway down the course.  Was this—a thing?  Was this a _thing_ -thing, like a _relationship_ -thing, or—?

“Um,” he said, “hey, can—well, first, I mean, thanks for driving me home last night; that was really cool of you.”

Soph smiled.  “Purely selfish of me, really.  I wanted to know you were safe.”

“Still,” Ed said.  He had to ask this question, didn’t he?  He had to find out the answer before he could make his next move.

But then—wasn’t it sort of implied?  Soph hadn’t just dragged him into an alley last night and hauled his pants down; and he’d shown up here and demanded kisses, not a quickie.  If this was some one-night stand shit, or some cheap hookup, wouldn’t… Well, wouldn’t it already be over by now?

Soph fanned his fingertips over the blush still simmering on Ed’s cheekbones.  “You can talk to me, you know.  I don’t bite.”  He slanted a grin.  “…unprovoked.”

Well, _that_ really helped with the fucking flustered-to-hell problem.

“Um,” Ed got out, “just—I, um—I mean, are we—”

“What?” Soph asked.  “Facebook-official?”

At least that was so funny that Ed sort of choked on the strangled laugh he hadn’t known was clawing up his throat.  “Well—sort of.  Yeah.  I guess.  Official.  Yeah.”

The man had eyes like nebulae, and Ed had never seen somebody focus on him like this—like _he_ was the one built of stardust; like he was worth studying through telescopes, worth charting out and contemplating as part of a career—

“Would you like us to be?” Soph said.

“I—yeah,” Ed said.  It was a fucking miracle he hadn’t just burst into flames by now, and given Soph a pretty good fucking burn on that soft, swift hand while he was at it.  “I—like you a lot.”

This was a whole new caliber of sweet-sexy grin, and Ed’s entire body froze for a second while he tried to take it in.

“Good,” Soph said.  The stroke of his fingertip down Ed’s jaw was so fucking slow, and so fucking light, and goosebumps ran down Ed’s arms so fast he clenched his fists on instinct— “You seem to be obsessed with working yourself ragged.  When’s your next day off?”

It took Ed a stupidly long time to grind the gears in his brain enough to think about it.  “Next—Wednesday.  I think.”

“Can I see you then?” Soph asked, steering a wisp of hair at the nape of Ed’s neck upwards towards his ponytail, like it’d stick.  Or maybe just—because.

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “Yeah, I’d—like that.  Um—I’ve got class until two, but after that—yeah.  If you want.”

“Believe me,” Soph said, grin curling wicked, eyebrow arched.  “I want.”

Ed’s spine didn’t just shiver; it fucking _vibrated_.  “I—awesome.  I—”

Soph’s fingertips trailed down along his jaw and settled under his chin, tipping his head up, and then that _mouth_ —tongue; teeth; wet heat; the slither of that silken hair against Ed’s chest, his neck, his throat—fucking transcendence—

“I can get us a hotel for the evening,” was the murmur against his lips.  “How does that sound?”

“Sounds—”

Jesus fuck, was that his voice?  He sounded like a rusted barn door squeaking in a fucking gale, only without the gale, because any serious wind would’ve drowned out his pathetic excuse for speech just now.  He cleared his throat.  There seemed to be an awful lot of fucking dreck in it.

“Sounds—”

This time, there wasn’t any trouble with the volume or the pitch; it was the concepts choking him.

It sounded salacious and depraved and ever so slightly—dangerous.  It sounded like anonymity and a locked room and an almost-stranger who kissed like an avenging angel and slid words like gemstones off a silver tongue.

Oh, holy goddamn shit and hellfire raging; Soph was still waiting for an answer.  Which made sense, ’cause Ed’s dumb ass, standing there stammering, still hadn’t said a thing.

“Sounds amazing,” he managed at last.  “Wednesday?”

“Wednesday,” Soph said, and somehow the single word sounded like a whole fucking sin.

  


* * *

  


On Monday, Ed’s phone started buzzing in his pocket right around eleven—while he was in class, of fucking course.  He jogged his knee while he waited for it to just _stop_ already, feeling the slow creep of guilt up from the pit of his stomach towards the eighteen thousand tiny hair-trigger panic buttons in his brain.

It was okay.  He’d call back when he got out of class; it wasn’t more than an hour; who could be mad about an hour?

Except—what if it was Al?  What if it was the fucking hospital, _about_ Al, because Al had crouched down to pet a kitty on the side of the road and gotten run down by a reckless bicyclist—or a shitty-ass driver losing control of the wheel—

Or what if it was Soph, and he _could_ be mad about an hour, and he gave up altogether and just—quit?

Fuckshithelldamn _God_.

Ed slung one leg over the other, chewed his lip, and watched the clock hand crawl while his skin did likewise.

  


* * *

  


The second that class wrapped up, he was out the door like a shot, dredging his phone up from his pocket to scan the screen.

It wasn’t the hospital, thank whatever benevolent powers might or might not have been coursing through the universe at that particular moment in time.  It was Soph, though.  And he’d left a message.  Like _that_ wasn’t some ominous shit.

Ed’s entire body tightened as he tapped his way into his voicemail.  He swallowed, swallowed, breathed, and raised the phone to his ear.

“Good morning,” Soph’s voice said, all honeyed butter, holy shit.  “Call me back, won’t you?”

That was it.

Just that.  The detached, robotic courtesy of the operator voice filled in the silence, letting Ed know his options to save or delete or whatever the fuck else.

Motherfucking son of a bitch, didn’t Soph know what he was doing?  Didn’t he know how fucking difficult it was for Ed to believe in anything?  In anything good, anyway, let alone the possibility of someone treating him like a worthwhile receptacle for some portion of the planet’s oxygen—?

Except—maybe he didn’t.  Maybe most people could handle a little bit of teasing, a little bit of playfulness—maybe that’s what this was supposed to be; maybe it wasn’t supposed to sound like a fucking threat.  Maybe that was on him.  Maybe that was in his head; maybe he was projecting; maybe he was about to tear this down before they’d even managed to fucking build anything—

He sat down on the worn marble steps in front of the chem building, took a deep breath, and thumbed the button to redial.

Shit, man, if there was such a thing as Purgatory, it sounded like the endless ringing of Soph Kimblee’s cell—

The line caught, as did Ed’s breath in his tormented throat.

“Hello,” Soph said.

It wasn’t even close to a question, which sort of threw Ed for a loop, which ended in him hesitating, then blurting out, “It’s Ed, from—the bookstore”, then flushing bright red in broad daylight and hating everything _sofuckingmuch_.

Goddamn it.

“I know,” Soph said, and Ed couldn’t tell whether that was condescension or amusement or maybe a smidgeon of each.

“Oh,” Ed said, feeling… fucking… stupid.  Helpless.  Some shit.  “Well—hi.  Sorry I didn’t pick up earlier; I was in class.”

“That’s fine,” Soph said, so fucking smooth-calm—impervious, unreadable, and Ed was clinging to the phone, and he felt like a moron, but… “I wanted to give you the address of the hotel.”

Holy frigging hell, this _was_ actually happening to him.  No damn doubt about it now.

“Awesome,” Ed fought out.  “You—wanna text it to me?”

“Just put me on speaker,” Soph said.  “You can type it directly into the mapping application that way.”

“Oh, yeah,” Ed said.  “Good point.”  Except… that… he was in a public place, having a personal call, and—well, shit, what if—Soph said something—y’know, private, or—?

Couldn’t worry about it yet.  Just had to trust college students to be so focused on their own little fucking worlds that they wouldn’t notice his fucked-up life playing out in front of them.

He tapped around with his left hand, realizing slowly that he seemed to have fisted the right one in his hair.  Shitfuck.  What the hell was wrong with him lately?

Well.  What the hell had been wrong with him since the day he’d been born, which would presumably stay wrong until the very end?

He tried to untangle his fingers from his fucking ponytail while he fumbled his way over to the Google Maps app.  Because Apple Maps was a piece of craps, as Dolch had taken to saying after that time it almost left him stranded in the middle of the Nevada desert en route to Vegas.

“Okay,” Ed said.  “Hit me with it.”

“That’s a bit forward,” Soph purred, and Ed’s whole face lit up scarlet like a fucking beacon to other humiliated idiots the world over; he tried to glance sideways to see if anyone was staring, but he couldn’t quite tell— “Perhaps we should save that for the second time.”  Before Ed could choke out more than a sort of strangled almost-breathing noise, Soph was dictating a street address in that same damn seduction voice, and it took just about everything he fucking had in him to pay enough attention to get it down.

“Okay,” he said when he had, and Google was wading through the murky 3G waters to find the place.  “I’ll just—pin it.  And… yeah.  See you… day after tomorrow, right?”

“That’s right,” Soph said.

“Cool,” Ed said, feeling like an idiot talking _at_ his phone, not _into_ it.  How did people do this whole speaker thing?  Too weird.  Too open.  “Um—how’ve you been?”

“I’ve been well,” Soph said.  “You?”

“Good,” Ed said.  “Y’know.  School and lab and whatever.  How’s… work and stuff?”

“Just fine,” Soph said.  “Not nearly as interesting as you.”

…yeah, he’d just said that out loud, on speaker, while Ed was on campus, with people around, hypothetically listening.  Ed sort of wanted to bang his head against the marble stair until he cracked open a hole big enough to hide in.  “Aw, jeez, c’mon.”

“I’m only being truthful,” Soph said, with a hint of a smile in his voice.  “You’re so easy to fluster; it’s really rather fun.”

“Aw, _jeez_ ,” Ed said, because apparently his touted brain had finally fucking short-circuited.  What a way to go.  What a _crappy_ way to go.  He’d been hoping for something exciting—lava, or drunk parkour, or a seriously ambitious experiment with hydrochloric acid and/or pyrotechnics… something.

Soph laughed, softly.  “If you didn’t react so delightfully, I wouldn’t toy with you.”

Holy fuckballs on a stick; had anybody heard that?

Speaking through the sticky shame in his throat presented Ed with something of a challenge.  “I mean—it’s not like I can—help it.”

“No need,” Soph said.  “I quite like it.  I’m looking forward to seeing you.”

Ed swallowed hard a couple times and found himself smiling a little at the thought.  “Yeah, I—yeah.  You too.”

And he was—he _was_.

He was just scared shitless at the same time, was all.

That was totally normal, right?

Maybe?

Sort of?

Fuck.

  


* * *

  


When Soph had said “hotel”, Ed’s brain had sort of filled in “janky-ass six-room motel where the locks don’t work, located smack-dab in the shittiest part of town”.  Somehow, mapping the location hadn’t quite shaken that image from his head.

So it was kind of a shock when he pulled into the parking lot and found himself staring up at what might as well have been the Ritz-fucking-Carlton with some Hilton on top.

He looked up at the classy entryway and the sparkly-clean windows, then back down at his phone.  He’d pulled into a parking spot but hadn’t killed the car engine, because this couldn’t be right.  Could it?

But Soph didn’t really seem like the kind of guy who made mistakes—Soph didn’t seem like the kind of guy who let anything get in his way, least of all something stupid like giving out the wrong hotel address.

Besides, it sort of… made sense, right?  The dude was classier than a crystal champagne glass refracting candlelight from an old-school chandelier.  He clearly had the money to sustain the lifestyle, or he wouldn’t’ve dressed like he did; and Ed didn’t remember what kind of car he drove, but it was comfortable as _hell_.  So it wasn’t unreasonable, was it, that he’d only want to stay at the kind of hotel that had actual fucking doormen hanging around?

Shit.  This really wasn’t Ed’s scene—understatement of the year, if not the century.  He’d dressed nice enough that a couple people from lab had asked where he was going after—to which he’d responded by trying not to blush hard enough to burst into flame and then saying “Got a thing,” which sort of answered the question without telling them anything at all—but he was still totally out of his depth.  Hopefully nobody would, like, spit on him and order him to go back to the gutter whence he came, especially since these guys probably expected tips… But his car looked painfully out of place, and the slow prickle of desperate humiliation was tracking over every centimeter of his skin.  He didn’t belong here.  He shouldn’t have come.  He felt like an eyesore—like a beer stain on Berber carpet or some shit, like…

Like he should probably get a hold of Soph and find out if this was really where he was supposed to be before he dragged his slovenly ass into the lobby and… what?  What the fuck could he even say?  _So I’m having sex with some guy who I guess is probably here; can you tell me his room number in the unlikely event that he even booked it under his real name?_

Fuck.

He’d figured out by now that Soph didn’t really _do_ text messages, which was… fine.  Ed was adaptable.  That was the thing, about humanity, especially about him—he was flexible, and he could learn shit; he could change habits when he had to.  If the not-texting thing was important to Soph, then he could make it work.

He put the car into park, ran a hand over his face, tried to smooth his hair, pulled out his phone, and went through his recent calls.  Soph was second to the top, except for Al.

The line rang… and rang… and maybe this was a stupid idea; maybe he was supposed to know that this was right; maybe he was showing that he didn’t trust Soph to tell him the right shit; maybe it was a test; maybe—

“Hello,” Soph said.

“Hey,” Ed said.  “Um—”

“Are you running late?” Soph asked.

“No,” Ed said.  He’d been too antsy-excited to be fucking late, and he knew it, but he glanced at the car clock anyway.  “No, I’m here, um—I think.  I mean—this place is _hella_ nice.”

He was hoping that curl in Soph’s voice was amusement, not contempt.  “It is.”  There was a slight rustle on the line.  “Is that you in the parking lot?”

Ed would’ve waved if he’d known which window to direct it at, although probably the angle would’ve made it impossible to tell.  “Crappy-ass black Civic?”

That sounded like an intimation of a laugh.  “I’m not sure I’d use those words exactly, but yes.”

“Okay,” Ed said, sagging in the seat a little with the stupid relief.  “Just—wasn’t sure I was in the right place.”

This time, the edge on Soph’s voice was definitely a sultry one.  _Fuck_.  “I’d go so far as to say that you’re in the right place at the right time.”

Ed swallowed down the adrenaline making a cold little ball in his throat.  “That’s pretty friggin’ nice for a change.”

“I imagine,” Soph said.  “Why don’t you come up?  It’s 644.”

Ed’s entire body had taken on a weird and uncharacteristic and probably unhealthy viscosity—the thoughts were sticking to the walls of his skull instead of coming free; the words were sticking in his throat instead of coming up; the blood was sticking in his veins; the heat was sticking in the pit of his stomach and driving the butterflies up towards his heart.

This shit was easy for other people.  He knew that; he could tell.  People talked about this kind of stuff—relationships, responses, _other human beings_ —like the whole damn game was childsplay; like the give-and-take didn’t drain them dry.  Like trying to figure out who you were supposed to be to make somebody care about you wasn’t enervating as all hell; like pretending to be all functional and together and attractive and shit wasn’t stressful like no presentation Ed’d ever done; like trying to trick people into liking you wasn’t the hardest fucking thing on Earth.

And you had to—trick them into liking you, that was.  You had to do it somehow, because you had to get them committed and invested and shit, or else they’d get the fuck out of Dodge the second they saw what you really were underneath, and…

And it wasn’t fucking easy for _him_.  But he saw other people doing it all the time, chatting about it, flitting from one social interaction to another, and he couldn’t for the life of him figure out how they did it.

He tried his best to take a deep breath, which—viscosity problem—stuck in his lungs.  He coughed it back out and forced a smile, because you could hear that sometimes.

“Sure thing,” he said.  “I’ll be right up.”

That, too, was easier fucking said than fucking done.  How were you even supposed to act in a place this posh?  Were they going to examine the soles of his shoes and toss him the hell out if there was mud on them?  Were you supposed to be, like, super courteous and gracious and shit to everybody, or where you supposed to kick the attendants out of the way like they were those tiny baby-velociraptor things from ‘Jurassic Park 2’?  Obviously erring on the side of the former was a better idea, but they’d know he was faking—not that they wouldn’t have noticed his car by now, but—

Well, shit.  Who cared?  Him, apparently, but hotel staff probably had to see shit that he couldn’t even dream of every single day, so one jumpy scruff-bucket of a kid wandering in to meet someone for sex probably barely even registered on the _What the Fuck_ Richter scale.

He climbed out of the car, grabbed his backpack and slung it over his left shoulder, shut the door, locked it, and shoved the keys into his pocket.  One deep breath later, he was going for it.  Fuck everything; the universe couldn’t stop him.  He wanted this, and he was going to get it.

He strode across the parking lot, and he did not hesitate; he did not slow his stride as the doorman reached for the shiny gold handle to usher him in—though he did smile as genuinely as he could and offer a “Thank you,” because customer service jobs sucked, and gratitude was free.

The shiny marble tiles of the foyer spread out in blinding splendor for what looked like miles.  There was a posh-cozy little living room-ish space off to the side with a bunch of ivory-colored couches and a huge flatscreen TV; there were racks with newspapers and a whole little bar with a guy standing behind it.  Ed looked at that instead of over at the extremely neat, extremely tall, extremely imposing counter where the clerks were standing.  He just had to keep moving briskly like he was supposed to be here, and he knew where he was going.  They had to see a million people stroll by every day, so they must’ve known they couldn’t remember everybody, and there was nothing illegal about walking into a hotel without a reservation if you’d been invited to share someone else’s, so no _way_ would they sic security on him, and this wouldn’t end in a tarnished permanent record and a night in jail and Al in tears—

When he made it to the first-floor hallway full of doors without being hailed or halted, he almost sighed aloud in relief.  The rest of this was cake—wasn’t it?

Presuming that _cake_ could mean _leaning against the handrail in the mirrored elevator fighting to breathe over the frantic, uneven banging of one’s heart_ , anyway, since that was what he ended up doing.

He was such a fucking idiot— _such_ a fucking… He didn’t even know what he was walking towards; he barely even knew who this guy _was_.  Soph might not even be a real name—and Al knew where Ed was, yeah, because he wasn’t a total fucking dingbat, but what good was having the address and whatever possibly-fake name Soph had given to the hotel gonna do if they found chopped-up pieces of Ed strewn all over the sheets tomorrow?

Was he really this desperate for just enough sex to make him forget how fucking lonely he was?

He slammed his head back against the elevator wall—hard.  He could make the fucking dissenting voices in his head shut up if he really worked at it; he knew he could; it was just a matter of time before he got those fucking things under control.  He was here because he wanted this—he had to remember that.  He was here because Soph was the kind of guy who would help him into the passenger seat and buckle him in and then come back and kiss him on his break; he was here because Soph gave a shit and was exciting, and there was nothing _wrong_ with that.  There was nothing wrong with him.  This was fine.  He was going to be fine.  He could make his own damn choices, and he could take care of himself.  It was fine.

The elevator sang.  The doors opened.  The tactful carpet led the way.  Like fucking Dorothy, like a sleepwalker dreaming, he followed it to the door marked _644_.  He raised his hand, looked at it, curled his fingers, and knocked.

Soph opened it with a slow, bright, gorgeous smile.

“Fancy meeting you here,” he said.

  


* * *

  


Roy was looking at him like… well, like Ed was poised to relate a long and detailed story about questionable sex with some other guy.  Which was pretty much a summary of things.  His hands had tightened around Ed’s until it almost hurt—but not quite; he was always so fucking careful—and his eyes were huge, and Ed wasn’t entirely sure either of them was breathing properly.

He probably needed to fix that.

He cleared his throat and took a deep breath in, then let it out—partly for himself, partly for demonstrative purposes.  Roy startled slightly, and his chest filled a little, and he pressed his lips together, eyes still searching Ed’s face.

“Long story short,” Ed said, looking at the edge of the table, “that… happened.  I mean, it was actually—it was really—fun.  He was—he was really good, and really, like, laser-focused, and it was weirdly hot, and then we got posh-ass room service, and he wouldn’t let me put my clothes back on, ’cause he said the fancy-ass robe they had made me look ‘too delicious altogether’, and… that was—great.  It was really great.  I really felt like he—wanted—me.  I was fucking high on it, I dunno, I…”  He had the distance, now, to know.  “I forgave a lot of shit I shouldn’t have because we’d had that.  I just kept thinking that maybe if I tried hard enough, if I was _good_ enough, I could fix all the shit that was going weird, and we could get back there, and it’d be great like that again.”

Roy extracted one of his hands from the tangle between them and brushed Ed’s hair back from his face—gently, so _gently_.

It wasn’t even gentleness.  That word wasn’t big enough.  Anybody could be gentle; anybody could keep their touch light.

Everything Roy did, every movement and every moment that passed between them, was bigger than gentle.

Everything Roy did was _loving_.

Roy wasn’t afraid.  Or he was, but he thought the risk was worth it, and he braved the vulnerability to put himself out there every single time.

“That’s not how it works,” he said softly.

“I know,” Ed said.  “But it seemed like—well.”  He was leaning in towards Roy’s fingertips; he couldn’t help it.  They were magnetic, and his brain was a well of iron ore, roiling slowly, churning hot.  “Anyway—abridged version.”

Roy looked slightly relieved.

“He was just sort of… obsessed with me,” Ed said.

Roy looked substantially less relieved.

“I mean,” Ed said, “I was obsessed with him, too, at the start, which was… I mean, that’s sort of how it goes, right?  You meet somebody, and you click with them, and you get all excited and shit.  Or at least I do.  But then—I mean, he wasn’t even really _excited_ ; he was just sort of…” He had to extract one of his hands from Roy’s to wave it around, like the word was going to materialize out of thin air and catch between his fingers.  “…intent.  I guess.  Single-minded or some shit.  And I was so excited I didn’t… it just felt like a compliment.  It felt like he cared.  It felt like I mattered.”

Roy squeezed his hand, and you could just _see_ him biting back the _You do, matter, Edward; you matter so much it staggers me sometimes_ or whatever way he’d say it; you could see it rising in his eyes, and Ed loved him so fucking hard in that moment that it felt like his soul couldn’t hold it, and he’d snap.

He swallowed.  Roy smiled, just a little.  Ed tried to smile back, and then he tried to keep going.

“So—yeah,” he said.  “It was just—fucked up.  Really fucked up.  But I didn’t really… It didn’t seem that bad at the time; it just seemed like he was really into me, and that was… yeah.  He’d call me while I was in lab and ask to see me after work all the time, and it was—I mean, I wouldn’t get off until after ten, and then we’d hang around in his car and make out and mess around for another hour or two, and then I had to go home and get my work done, and… I was just a fucking wreck from it after a while.  And if I told him when he called that I was really tired, and I needed some sleep, and could I just see him later, he’d say ‘Fine’ in this voice like _acid_ and just—hang up.  And I’d call back and call back, and he wouldn’t pick up until I’d called five or six times, and I’d try to apologize, and he’d say ‘You don’t need to be sorry for not wanting to see me; you can’t help it’, and I’d have to spend half an hour trying to convince him that I _did_ want to, and—yeah.  Just—yeah.  And then that night he’d sit there and give me the cold shoulder until I’d groveled for a while, and then he’d—” Fuck.  Fuckfuckfuck, it still—it was never going to get any less shitty, was it?  The boil of shame and misery in the pit of his stomach was never going to go away.  “He’d shove my head down in his lap, and after I blew him, he’d forgive me until a couple days later, when I was just so fucking exhausted that I’d ask again.”

“Edward,” Roy said softly.

“I _know_ ,” Ed said, gripping Roy’s hand with both of his again; Roy’s free fingers settled very lightly on his knee.  “But it was—you know how when you’re in the middle of it, you can’t see what it is?”

He chanced a glance up.  Roy smiled, but his eyes were so damn sad.  “Yes,” he said.

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “And—I mean, when I did have days off, he was—I mean, he’d come pick me up; he was all swish as hell—it was a Lexus, that he had, and that was a _nice_ fucking car—and he had, like, twelve different hotels he liked, and we’d just—he’d buy me books, he’d bring me chocolates, and we’d get incredible room service and a shit-ton of dessert, and watch pay-per-view movies, and he’d just _look_ at me for fucking ages, and he’d trace his fingertips so fucking light along all the scars and whisper shit like ‘My sweetest patchwork boy’, and—”

Consternation flashed across Roy’s face, lightning-quick and thunder-dark.

Ed had to get through this, now, or he never would.

He swallowed again, fought in a breath, let it out slow, twisted the tail of it into words.

“Mostly that part was—it made me feel really… special.  Spoiled, almost.  And that was kind of—I dunno, embarrassing, maybe, and I felt kind of guilty, but—but I thought—y’know, there was nothing _wrong_ with him wanting to do nice shit for me, and it did make me happy a lot.  And I started to feel sort of—comfortable—with the nice places, and the pretty stuff, and the good food and whatever, and… I thought maybe that was okay.  I talked to Al about it one time, and he was like, ‘Brother, you’re not using him; he’s giving it to you because he wants to; I know you, and you don’t go into these things with demands, and unless he’s an idiot, he doesn’t think you expect it.’  So I figured—maybe it was okay.”

“There’s nothing wrong with liking to be treated well,” Roy said slowly.

“I mean—not by itself,” Ed said, although there was, kind of, wasn’t there, when you didn’t appreciate it for the privilege that it was?  “But—I mean, with this, it… there were…” He dragged in yet another fucking fortifying breath.  “Conditions.  I guess.  It started to be a game—for him, anyway; I didn’t even know we were playing until later.  Way later.  Looking back.  It started to be—he’d order a bunch of food and be fine, be great, but then it’d get to us, and I’d get excited for it, and he’d say ‘Well, good to know that this is why you’re here,’ and he’d take the little silver dome-things—just—he’d throw them.  At the walls, and shit, never _at_ me, but it was so fucking _loud_ , have you ever—?  And I’d—I’d be doing the same thing again, trying to convince him, ‘No, no, it’s not, I want to see you, we could do this anywhere, I don’t care about this, I’m not even hungry, look, don’t be mad at me, please,’ and—”

He had to look away; Roy’s eyes were too… much.  Too big, too deep, too… terrified.

“Sometimes he’d—grab me, grab my clothes, yank me in right up against him and just _look_ at me for—I dunno, thirty seconds, forty-five; it felt like forever; and I wouldn’t—I wouldn’t do _anything_ , but after that he’d say ‘I believe you,’ and he’d let go and smooth my clothes out and tell me to take my hair down and then start telling me how—pretty I was, and…”

Roy closed his eyes.  His throat worked; his jaw worked; his fingers tightened slightly around Ed’s.

Ed focused on their intertwining fingers resting on the worn knee of his jeans.

“He started to push me a lot,” he said, and the words sounded so fucking _weird_ out loud—so much smaller than it had been, so fucking _pathetic_ , so… weak.  “Just—y’know, over to where he wanted me, or onto the bed, or—whatever, but it—you know how… there’s this difference, in—I dunno, body language and tone of voice and just… all that shit?  Between when it’s playful, and when it’s… not?”

“Yes,” Roy said, very, very quietly, and Ed could feel that those goddamn gorgeous eyes were going _hot_ , bad-hot, but he didn’t quite dare to look.

“Anyway,” Ed said.  He ran his thumb along the side of Roy’s index finger, back and forth.  “He… it just… got… worse… as it went along.  When I had shit I wanted to do, I’d tell him a week or two in advance and then every day leading up— _carefully_ , ’cause I thought he’d be mad; I thought he’d… I don’t know, hit me, or leave, or something, and—like, I’d tell him I was going to be hanging out with Al and Win for a night or something, because I fucking missed them, and Winry didn’t live down here back then, so she wasn’t always in town, and… he’d call, and call, and when I picked up, he’d keep me on the phone for hours, and it was just—”

“Oh, God, Ed,” Roy said.

“It was pretty shitty,” Ed said.  Understatement, maybe, but there were people who had it worse; there were people who had it a _lot_ worse.  And there were people who had to go through it alone, without Al or anybody.  And there were people who never made it out.  “Al kept just—asking me if I was okay, asking me to tell him what’d happened and shit, and—but I always—it just felt like it was my fault, because it’d started out one way, and now it was another way, so what did I do wrong, right?  So I just kept telling him it was fine, and it was okay, and maybe we were going through a rough patch, but he was—important to me, so it was… fine.  And I could tell Al didn’t want to push too hard, because he didn’t want me to get defensive, so I’d tell him just enough to get him off my back, and—”

That hurt the worst—well.  Close to the worst.  That hurt a fucking lot, the way he’d manipulated Al like that, over—what?  Some piece of shit asshole fucking psychopath with nice hair.  He’d risked what he and Al had over one good fuck and the empty promise of more—over his fucking _pride_ about it; over the terror of having to admit that he’d hurled himself into this, and it had blown up in his fucking face.  Over having to face the fact that he had categorically failed.

“A-anyway, after…” He cleared his throat again.  “It was just about five months, all together.  Then there was one day when I was in lab, and Izumi, like, touched my shoulder while I was working, and I almost jumped out of my fucking skin, and she was like, ‘Can I talk to you?’, and she took me in her office and sat me down, and I felt like I was in a fucking interrogation room in a police station or some shit, and—she was like, ‘Your personal life is your business, but I’m worried about you, and if there’s something going on that you need to talk about, I’m here for you, okay?’”

Roy clasped both of Ed’s hands between his palms.  “She’s still your PI, isn’t she?”

Ed nodded.  “She kicks ass.  But it—I mean that was—a little bit of a light went off.  I still felt—just—swamped, I don’t know, fucking guilty, like I’d… like I’d had everything going right, I’d had it in front of me, and I’d fucked it up, and now I was in this pit of fucking disaster I’d made somehow, but if I figured out what I’d done wrong, I could undo it, and it’d be great again.  Except hearing that from her, it seemed like… something had changed me so significantly that she’d noticed, and she was _concerned_ , right?  And then I started trying to think about it in a bigger-picture way, I guess, and I started to think—what the fuck am I doing?  I’m jumpy as fuck and scared and miserable all the fucking time, and the variable here is _that guy_.  And everybody I know thinks something bad is happening, and these are smart people; this is Al and Izumi; these are people that I trust who don’t like what’s going on, and maybe they’re on to something.”

“It’s hard,” Roy said softly, squeezing both his hands, trying to meet his eyes—or it seemed like it; Ed still couldn’t summon the balls to look.  “To see the forest for the trees, and to separate the factual reality of a moment from your emotional experience of it.”

“You probably know a thing or two about that,” Ed said.  “Mr. Lawyer-Man.”

“I’d like that on a T-shirt,” Roy said.

Ed pushed his facial muscles into something like a smile.

Roy’s thumbs skimmed over the backs of his hands.

“That’s enough,” Roy said.  “That’s more than enough; that’s far more than enough.  I’m sorry I—” He swallowed, drew a breath, cleared his throat, and took another.  “I’m sorry I made you relive so much of it.  I mean that.”

“No,” Ed said.  Roy had the most beautiful hands of anyone Ed had ever met.  “No need to be sorry, ’cause it’s not your fault.  And…” Fuckityshitdamn.  “…it’s not… enough.  That’s not… There’s a lot… left.”

“Edward,” Roy said.

No choice—magnets in his body, charged particles in his soul; his eyes slid up to Roy’s in spite of his damned reservations.

“You have nothing to prove,” Roy said.  “Not to me.  Nothing to justify.  You are not on trial.”  He extracted one hand and lifted it to touch Ed’s cheek—just with his fingertips, barely grazing the skin, so light Ed’s nerves prickled in the best possible way.  “Nothing you can say will change the enormity of my respect for you or make me feel any different.  You don’t have to finish unless you want to.”

Ed felt the air rushing in to fill his lungs, then flowing back out, leaving them to collapse—meat balloons.  If you really thought about it, just about everything in the human body was just… meat.  The electric signals making up thoughts were the real magic; any idiot could grow a kidney _in utero_ , right?

…barring DNA errors and genetic malfunctions and all that stuff.  So maybe that wasn’t really a good example after all.

The point was, life was short and fucking arbitrary, and he was going to make the best of every fucking second that he could.  It was worth being brave for.  It was worth getting through this.

“‘Want’ is kind of a funny word in that sentence,” he said to Roy—Roy and his deep, deep, gorgeous eyes.

Roy almost smiled.  “I suppose it is.”

Ed flooded the meat balloons again.  “I think—I’d better.  While I’ve got the momentum.  Better just—get it over with.”

Roy held his hands a little tighter and spoke a little softer, which probably shouldn’t have been possible by now.  “All right.”

“All right,” Ed said.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First off: this chapter is even more intense than the last one! Same thematic elements, but ramped up a lot. Please be careful, and feel free to drop me a line asking about specifics if you need them! ♥
> 
> Second, I have some news, which was going to be good news until it turned into bad news, which may have sort of circled back to good news for you and bad news for me.   ~~HOW FUN WAS THAT SENTENCE, BE HONEST~~
> 
> tl;dr: I was finally assembling Part 5 from the separate documents where I keep the past-tense stuff and the presen-tense stuff because I am a disaster, and I discovered that – not according to keikaku – PART 5 DOESN'T ACTUALLY FIX ALL THE SHIT WE GET IN THIS ONE.
> 
> The "good" news: if I can get my shit together and edit fast enough, we might just have to run the updates all the way through Part 6 right after Part 5.  Ficsplosion.
> 
> The bad news: if you're holding out for all of the really bad cliffhangery shit to get resolved, you probably want to play it safe and not read anything after next chapter (Part 4, Chapter 3, that is) until we're at least a chapter or two into Part 6.  Part 4 only has four (long-ass) chapters; and it looks like Part 5 follows suit; so _hopefully_ we're looking at 10 weeks?  But if there are Complications with Part 6, or with me accidentally having a life and shit, that could change, so I don't want to make you guys any promises. ♥
> 
>  
> 
> **RECAP:** Present-day!Ed just met up with Hohenheim at the train station, and they're going to go to Kensington Gardens to walk around and catch up; past-tense!Ed is telling Roy the story of how he eventually realized he needed to get away from Kimblee after an extremely nasty abusive relationship unfolded around him.

Ed comes to his senses a couple blocks down.  Hohenheim’s been rambling about something.  Possibly the pigeon infestation.  He seems to know more about pigeon morphology than any non-ornithologist has any right to.

There’s a trash can off to Ed’s right, so he veers away from his dazed zombie-stagger walking path and dumps his empty tea cup into it, then veers back.

“No kidding,” he says, which is a pretty good silence-filler when someone’s clearly reached the end of a sentence, but you don’t have any fucking clue whether you’re supposed to react with a positive or a negative.

Hohenheim nods idly, so apparently that was close enough to what he expected Ed to say that he suspects nothing.

“So, um.”  Ed’s guts seize up.  Here comes the brave part.  “So… I mean, I kind of know what you’ve been up to—I read a little about your research.”

He takes one deep breath, then another, then looks up at the wrought-iron gate they’re passing through.  Greenery sprawls out everywhere around them; there are flowers and hedges and trees, and it’s all so picturesque he considers—for a second—just dropping it.  Just letting this be decent instead.

But he can’t.  He’s like a fucking puppy with a favorite rag.

“What I don’t know,” he says, “is why you left.”

There are chirping sparrows and little kids with tiny, fluffy dogs.  Rosebushes.  Blue sky—that’s practically a sign of the Apocalypse in this city, isn’t it?

“Ah,” Hohenheim says.

He goes quiet, and Ed thinks…

Ed thinks _Fuck that; fuck you_.  Ed keeps his mouth shut.  Ed waited for him for fucking years—waited for less than a word; waited for a letter, a whisper, a clue.  He can damn sure outlast Hohenheim’s reluctance to give him an answer now—when that bastard’s only choices are indescribably awkward silence or caving to Ed’s will.

Ed’s will has withstood greater tests than this.  Ed’s will has withstood better men.

“I thought you might ask,” Hohenheim says.

…that’s all he says.

The _fucker_.

Ed pushes his hands into his pockets and curls them into fists to stop himself from glaring.

Hohenheim takes off his glasses, lowers them, wipes them carefully with the corner of his cardigan, holds them up to the light, breathes on them, wipes them again, and then puts them back on.

“Before I met your mother,” Hohenheim says, “I was involved in quite a lot of very cutting-edge prototyping for electronic devices and so forth.”  He sighs, not at all regretfully.  “As much as it’s an enormous cliché, your mother changed everything.  I’d been slavering for fame and fortune all my life, and then suddenly the only thing I could imagine wanting was _her_.  Nothing else mattered; the whole world sank into a fog of absolute irrelevance; she was the only other human being on the planet.  And all I wanted was to serve her—I scrambled to try to tie up some loose ends and turn them into money so that I had enough to make her more comfortable than she could possibly imagine; it was a compulsion in me—to give her everything I had.”

He pauses, like he’s waiting for Ed to comment.  Ed’s currently biting his tongue on _So how much did you try to buy her for?_ , however, so Hohenheim can just fucking keep on waiting ’til the stars burn out, as far as he’s concerned.

“We met at a restaurant,” Hohenheim says, like it fucking matters.  “I was out with my… you might call them ‘cronies’, I suppose—and we were making a tremendous noise, rather late.  She was waiting our table.  Their uniform was this… she had this black skirt to her knees, and black tights, and a green polo shirt.  It made her eyes _incredible_.  I felt like I’d been shot.”  He smiles, sunnily, and adjusts his glasses.  “She probably wished all of us had been.  We were diagramming all over the table, talking much too loud—we had a company wanting to invest in our prototype, and you know how young men are when they’re flushed with an impending victory.”

“Not really,” Ed says.

Hohenheim blinks at him.  “Surely you celebrated winning the Nobel.”

“Well, yeah,” Ed says.  His stomach’s churning; fuck this shit.  Hohenheim’s judgment doesn’t _matter_.  Nothing about this bastard does.  “But that was, like… me and Roy taking Al and Winry out to a fancy-ass dinner and then going home and going to sleep.”

Hohenheim looks at him.

Ed looks back.

“It is extraordinary,” Hohenheim says, “that you can have such youthful verve coupled with a very old soul.”

Ed has no idea what the fuck Hohenheim just said.  “Th… anks.  I guess.”  He looks over at some flowers so he won’t just stare.  “You were talking about Mom.”

“Ah,” Hohenheim says.  “So I was.”

And it’s fucking _creepy_ —his voice sounds exactly the way that Al’s does when Al starts on about Winry.  Even though they’re in totally different registers, the inflections are identical, and it sends a current like hungry electricity up Ed’s spine.

“So,” Hohenheim goes on.  “There we were, rambunctious as a bunch of children; and there she was, like an angelic vision in a half-apron.  She brought a tray with glasses of water, and as she was setting them down, she asked us if we wanted anything else.  I was so tongue-tied I only shook my head, but one of my colleagues on the other side of the booth—Horace, Horace Monk; he’s on the Fortune 500 now, which tells you almost all you need to know—looked her up and down and licked his lips like an _animal_ and said ‘How much for you?’”

Ed’s not sure if he’s ever experienced this precise cocktail of mortified fascination before.  “Wh—you were in—what, graduate school?  How old was _she_?”

“Seventeen and three-quarters,” Hohenheim says.  He notices the look on Ed’s face.  “It was different then.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Ed says.  “People just weren’t fighting it yet.”

Hohenheim arches an eyebrow.  “That—” He pauses.  “Well… perhaps you’re right.”

Ed can’t help staring this time.  Did he walk into a weird-ass fucking universe-swapping warp hole, or did his fuckoff dad just concede his point?

“In any case,” Hohenheim says, “her age notwithstanding, I was horrified that Horace could say such a thing to such a lovely young lady, and I started to stand up from the table to tell him so.  That was, of course, precisely at the moment that he actually _reached_ for her, and she leapt back, so she bumped into me, and the three remaining glasses of ice-water on her tray all poured directly down my shirtfront.”

Ed’s heart is doing a funny thing, hovering halfway between his throat and his ears, with a faintly-beating presence in both.  “Whose fault was it?”

Hohenheim blinks at him.  “How do you mean?”

“The crashing into each other and stuff,” Ed says.  “Whose fault would you say it was?”

Hohenheim blinks some more, then tugs at one of his sleeves.  “I… to be honest, I’m not sure.  Probably mine.  Your mother was always rather graceful—you’d just about have to be, to wait tables for several years at a stretch without injuring yourself, I suppose.”  He smiles, ruefully.  “I was always more the type to get distracted by a wayward thought and tip right off of whatever I was sitting on, or to trip over my own feet in the middle of walking the moment that I let my mind wander off.”

That’s—

Crushing.  Is what that is.

It’s a stupid thing to feel like shit about, but Ed can’t fucking _help_ it, and mostly he’s learned not to try to fight the landslide with things that feel like this.

But there was a moment there—a flicker of a searingly wonderful hope—where he thought maybe he’d inherited the clumsy-awkward shit from her.

She’d never seemed especially ill-at-ease when they were kids, but his memories are fading, and he doesn’t always trust them to begin with, knowing what he does about the brain.  It always seemed like Al got all the parts of her—the shape of his eyes and his smile; the texture of his hair; even the cut of his jaw has _her_ in it, whether or not it’s angled in a slightly more masculine way.  He got all of her poise and all of her articulateness and all of her calm and her sweetness and her kindness and her… height.

But Ed thought—just for that solitary fucking instant… What if she’d had a little seed of stupid awkwardness pushed way beneath?  What if the collection of tiny social failures that makes Ed dread most human interaction—that dogged, baseline unawareness that makes him put his foot directly into his mouth every other minute—was actually a piece of her that he’d been carrying with him all this time?  What if she’d been _with_ him in every single moment of miserable, fumbling shame?

Except she wasn’t.

It’s not from her.

It’s from Hohenheim.

Because the mirror’s just not damning enough as is.

Hohenheim seems to be waiting to find out what the hell is going on in Ed’s head.  Probably Ed’s making a weird face or something.

“Right,” he manages, forcing himself to focus.  “Sorry.  Go ahead.”

Hohenheim hesitates, but then he just barrels onward, which would’ve proved the point even if Ed didn’t already feel it in his fucking bones.

“So there I was,” Hohenheim takes up, “standing there staring down at myself, absolutely drenched.  She started to apologize, and I started to apologize, and then I asked where the restroom was at the same moment she said ‘Let me get a towel’, so it ended up with me following her and then realizing we were at the kitchen, and she was handing me dishtowels and apologizing again.  I kept telling her it was really all right—and that at least it hadn’t been boiling water, after all—and that I’d probably deserved it, really.  She gave just one glance back towards the table and said that if it had been about _deserving_ , she would have dumped it on someone else.  And she would have aimed for something specific.”

Ed wishes—hard and earnest in that moment—that Elicia was here after all.  She’d understand.  She’d recognize this feeling—the dull pain of almost-finding another facet of someone that you miss with your whole being but never really knew.

“I laughed,” Hohenheim says, “and she laughed, and I made my rather damp way back to the table before too long, and I left her an enormous tip—and my telephone number on the receipt, which I think was perhaps the gutsiest thing I’d ever done, including the several quite enormous leaps of engineering logic which had gotten me there in the first place.”

Ed swallows.  That’s—

It isn’t so much that he thought all the people saying _History repeats itself_ were full of shit, exactly—just that it’s supposed to be the larger scale, right?  Wars happen over and over because there’s a human impulse dragging all of them towards destruction.  Stuff like _this_ —this should be too small to count.

“Did she call you?” he asks.

“Yes,” Hohenheim says, and he looks about as pleased as punch.  Which, incidentally, is what Ed is going to do to him if he says anything fucked-up about Mom.  “Just long enough to tell me I should come by after one of her shifts so that we’d actually have time to talk.”

Ed tries to imagine a world where Hohenheim doesn’t make his internal organs twist up and try to stab each other with severed blood vessels out of the sheer force of his blinding anger.  There must have been a world like that, once—at least for Mom.  She must have liked him a lot.

And maybe that makes more sense than it seems like on the surface.  Maybe that’s fucking history again, circling back.  She’s not the only one who gravitated to somebody older and sort of charming who showed an interest in her despite all the rest of it—despite the shitty job and the lack of prospects and an air of world-weariness acquired well before the age of twenty.  Someone whose attention felt like a blessing; felt like it was elevating; felt like it _changed_ something; felt like it validated all the other crap—

Maybe Ed got that much that from her.

“The rest,” Hohenheim is saying, “I suppose you can imagine.  But that’s a bit of a diversion from my original point, isn’t it?”

Probably.  Ed can’t really remember.

“I was explaining why I left,” Hohenheim says.

Fuck.  That’s like a chunk of ice dropping into the pit of Ed’s stomach, no damn mistake.

“Right,” he says, possibly a little bit weakly.

“I was still involved quite a lot with those fellows I told you about,” Hohenheim says.  “Which is somewhat unfortunate, as far as Horace Monk goes, but—in any case, we founded our little company, and we sweated like mad trying to make it work.”  He does the wry-smile thing and adjusts his glasses again.  It’s incredible the man doesn’t have a fucking rash from fiddling with them every five damn seconds.  “I believe you call that a ‘startup’ nowadays—there wasn’t much of a precedent for it back then.  But it worked.  All of the effort and the tearing our hair out yielded an incomprehensible amount of lucre as time went on, and more people signed on and contributed their capital.  Suddenly we were public, with our original cadre as the primary shareholders, and the stock was just skyrocketing so quickly it was almost impossible to track.  But of course it all came at a cost.  Everything does; there’s a balance, and it’s important to respect.”

He gestures outward, meaninglessly, towards the picturesqueness sprawled out around them.  Did Ed get that habit from him, too?  Motherfucking fuck.

“We were paying with our _lives_ —you know?  With our youth, with our passion, with our energy.  With every waking moment.  And when canceling dates with your mother started to make me feel like something had been ruptured inside of my heart… I realized I needed to reevaluate that balance.  Because—for the first time in as long as I could remember—there was something I cared about far more than the ambition, and the acquisition, and all of it.  More than the possibility of fame.  For the first time, my life wasn’t just a game anymore.  Suddenly existence itself had a meaning, and a direction, and a point.  Suddenly my own life was something I wanted to build—to experience and explore, properly this time.  And I wanted to do those things with someone in particular.”

“Yeah,” Ed says, which is the smallest word there is for it.

“I needed more time,” Hohenheim says.  “And I needed to have enough of myself left at the end of the day to give her the best of me.”

Fucking shitfuck hell _damn_.  If that doesn’t sound _way_ too fucking familiar—

“In addition to the simple fact of falling so desperately in love with her,” Hohenheim says, “I was simultaneously beginning to realize—also unprecedented in my thought process, you understand—that the ultimate goal of having children is to preserve a part of someone that you love so much that you can’t imagine depriving the world of them if there’s anything you can do to help it.  It’s about adoring someone so entirely that you just want to share them with as many generations as you can conceive of.”

Ed waits for an acknowledgment of the pun.

Hohenheim just sort of gazes off down the path in a pensive sort of way.

Well, shit.  At least that’s all his—his and Roy’s, really.  Roy started it.  Probably Roy started it.  And even if he didn’t, Ed fully intends to blame him anyway.

“It is so beautiful,” Hohenheim says, “to see her name across newspaper headlines, and on the internet, and in magazines and on the television, and to hear it out of people’s mouths.  She wouldn’t have cared—she never needed that; she never thrived on attention like most of the people that I knew back then.  But it’s wonderful that you two have done exactly what I always dreamed.  You’ve made her live forever.”

Ed’s throat closes so fast—so tight, so hot, so stickily compressed the whole way down, like it’s been scalded raw, and the oozing sides are adhering to each other—that he can’t say what he wants to.

_No, we fucking haven’t.  We fucking didn’t.  Because we couldn’t do a goddamn thing without you—because we were a pair of fucking_ kids _with no money and no knowledge and no resources, and you fucked off and left us to look after her, and she died._

_You could have done something. Fuck this fake-ass immortality shit_ you _think’s so great; I’d trade back everything I’ve ever gotten from the world if I could just have a single fucking day with her again, and you think—newspaper headlines?  You think seeing ‘Elric’ inked out in print makes what she went through worthwhile?  You think that makes_ any _of it okay?  You think the fact that we pieced ourselves back together and carried on—because we had to; because you you_ left _us, and you left us without a_ choice _—can in any fucking aspect measure up to the life she could have lived if something had been different?_

_Fuck you, old man.  Fuck_ you _and your fucking academic’s ego.  Fuck you for never learning what she tried to teach you all along._

He tries to pull a deep breath into his lungs, and it snags all the way down.

“She’d be so proud of you,” Hohenheim says.

If the bastard is expecting a response here, he’s going to be seriously fucking disappointed, because Ed’s not going to be able to generate words for several fucking minutes at this rate.

At least he said it that way, though.  Because Hohenheim himself has no fucking _right_ to be proud of anything they’ve done—of any of the things they’ve survived long enough to become.  The only goddamn thing he contributed to their lives was a couple fucking chromosomes of DNA.

It’s like he said—life’s a thing you build.  Brick by fucking brick, bloody-knuckled and brokenhearted when you have to.

“We just did what needed doing,” Ed forces out, and if his voice is a little shaky and a little husky—well.  Fuck it.  He’s entitled.

“I’d say you did a great deal more than that,” Hohenheim says.

Ed runs the tip of his tongue along the inside of his teeth—slowly, counting them to ground himself.  He can almost hear Roy’s voice in his head.  _Don’t rise to it.  Don’t let him hurt you.  He’s not worth it.  You have been cycling this acid through yourself for so long; you don’t_ have _to.  You are so much more than he could possibly imagine.  You are so much more beneath the surface than he deserves to know._

“Guess so,” he says.  His pulse beats in his throat; he can feel it.  Roy would kiss him there—right over the artery, soft-grazed lips and then a playful hint of teeth.  It’s a beautiful fucking day in Kensington, and he’s not going to let his deadbeat fuckoff asshole father thrash his fucking feelings—intentionally or otherwise.  “So… what?  It sounds like you were finally happy, or trying to be.”  Deep breaths; one, two, three squeezes of the moving blood.  “Why the hell did you leave?”

  


* * *

  


The contours of his entire world had changed, shifting to fit Soph’s silhouette on every wall of every structure he was trying to create.  He had to fix that before the spaces left for Soph Kimblee’s shape brought the whole fucking place down around him.

He was trying to remember the most important thing he’d ever learned about himself—that nobody owned him.  He wasn’t dumb enough to figure that he was the master of his own fate or any of that shit—watching your mom wither in the cold hands of cancer would cure you of the notion of having any _real_ autonomy pretty fucking quick—but over the years, through all the _No_ s and _Impossible_ s and _You can’t_ s, he’d gradually come to the conclusion that other human beings couldn’t hold him down.  Yeah, there were pesky little things called laws, and rules, and the exertion of institutional power; and yeah, those could be insurmountable sometimes—but one on one?  He could take fuckin’ anybody.  Bring it on.  He’d made it this far, and he wasn’t anywhere near fucking finished yet.  Anybody dumb enough to try him was in for the surprise of their goddamn life.

Anyway.

He could do this.

All he had to do was keep it together.

Deep breaths and the unshakable factual knowledge that Al would have his back no matter what were the only weapons he had some days.  Today, for instance.  Today, they were just going to have to be enough.

Between classes, he parked his ass on the stairs of the chem building and hit Soph’s number in his phone.

One ring.  Two.  His heart was banging like a whole fucking drumline full of drama queens trying to share instruments—loud and angry and arrhythmic and painful; it was almost too much to—

“Good afternoon,” Soph’s voice said smoothly—and so neutrally that Ed just couldn’t quite tell if he’d looked at his caller ID, or… what.

“It’s me,” Ed said for good measure.  Shit, that sounded so fucking rude.  “H-hi.”

“Hello,” Soph said, typically fucking opaque.

Ed mustered all the damn guts that he had left after how his stomach had dropped out when the line picked up.  “Hey.  So.  I mean, I dunno if you were planning—if you wanted—to see me tonight, but—I just—think—we should talk.  About… things.”

The pause stretched so damn long that Ed took the phone away from his ear to make sure the call hadn’t dropped.  The little timer was still ticking merrily the fuck away; it was just—silence.  He couldn’t even hear Soph breathing, although maybe that was because his heart was beating so fucking hard—

“Ah,” Soph said after about six millennia had come and gone and ground all of the mountains into dust.

Ed swallowed.  “We could—we could talk—now.  If you want.”

“No,” Soph said, so fucking calmly, like it didn’t matter, like none of it mattered—and that was all Ed… wanted.  Wasn’t it?  To matterto someone.  “Later.  I already have a reservation.”

Guilt, like a sledgehammer on a fucking anvil in the center of his chest.

Soph had already made the plans, already found the time; he’d been looking forward to it; he only sounded blasé because he was trying not to be bothered because he knew it scared Ed shitless when he started to get pissed—

And Ed was going to go walk in there and break up with him.

He was such a piece of shit.  He was such a piece of _shit_ ; why did anybody ever eventalk to him—?

He closed his eyes and pressed his knuckles into the inside corner of the right one, like he could force some of his own shittiness out through the back of his skull.

“Okay,” he said.  “Where—should I meet you?”

Soph gave him another hotel address.  He’d gotten in the habit of memorizing them so he didn’t have to put the whole call on speaker, because sometimes Soph—said stuff.  Just—stuff.  Sometimes.  About what he wanted to do to Ed when he saw him, or whatever.

Holy shit.  He wasn’t going to have to do that anymore, after today—right?  He wasn’t going to have to walk on any more fucking eggshells; he wasn’t going to have to measure out his thoughts and say shit carefully and pretend he didn’t notice great food even when he was starving and lie to Al about the origin of bruises which were mostly-consensual but sometimes sort-of-not, but it wasn’t that he didn’t _deserve_ them; it was just…

The jolt went through him like he’d grabbed a live wire with both hands.  He’d seen his own shadow just now—seen it cowering in the corner with both arms over its head, so fucking desperate to be loved that it had changed into a shape he barely recognized.

He wasn’t going to have to do this anymore.

The thought made his heart quicken and his breath deepen; probably his eyes got all melodramatically wide.  He was going to be free of all of this shit; being alone was _better_ than always feeling like he’d fucked up, always feeling like he had to make up for some shit, always feeling like he wasn’t good enough and couldn’t be and had to try harder even though he wouldn’t ever succeed.

“All right,” he said into the faceless phone.  “I’ll see you later, then.”

“I’ll look forward to it,” Soph said.

Ed stared at the blank screen after the line went dead.  Soph had to know.  He _had_   to.  He was smart like a fucking tack-sharpening machine; there was no way he hadn’t added it up.

Ed put his phone in his pocket and his head in his hands.  Deep breaths, and Al.  He was going to be okay.

  


* * *

  


Night was falling hard—like he had, how hi-fucking-larious—by the time he made it to this week’s model of swanky-ass hotel.  There were several possible explanations: for instance, that two miles sounded like less than it really was; or that Google Maps had lied about the distance; or that Ed just… hadn’t really wanted to get there.  He’d figured that walking would help to clear his head, and it was a damn sight closer than most of the places Soph had favored so far, but… maybe that had been a mistake.  Seemed like he’d made a fuckton of those lately.

Soph had called an hour ago—Ed had been driving back from class, not that he would have wanted to pick up even if he hadn’t had his hands full of steering wheel and his mouth full of all-new hellish torments he wanted to bestow on the imbeciles around him—and left him a message with the room number and not much else.

He hadn’t packed anything this time; he wasn’t planning on staying, after all.  Al had given him a look like he was… what?  It wasn’t quite _Brother, you’re messed up in the head_ ; that was mostly reserved for amateur parkour experiments and impossible amounts of shit he wanted to accomplish in minuscule amounts of time in lab.

But Al had leveled that complicated look on him and said, in a neutral kind of voice, “I’m not sure it’s a good idea to be alone with him for this conversation.  Would you like me to come?”  He hadn’t looked down towards where Ed’s T-shirt covered the fat purpling bruise under his collarbone (which Ed had waved away, like always; waved away with _Huh?  No, it’s cool, I mean, it was just… excitement, he got a little too excited, it wasn’t anything_ bad _, it wasn’t like… whatever you’re thinking_ )—but Ed had felt it prickling all the same.  There’d been a bubble of hysterical laughter in his throat; he’d choked it down, but he couldn’t help the thought: _By the pricking of my bruises, something wicked this way cruises_.

Funny, right?

Real funny.

The girl at the front counter at the hotel eyeballed him but didn’t say anything as he crossed the shiny-ass lobby to the shiny-ass elevator.  If any of these places had an actual security breach, it was gonna be a fucking disaster; nobody ever so much as asked him who he was meeting—some of them didn’t even greet him to try to make him nervous.  To be fair, they sort of had to assume that someone on another shift had checked him in, and he was allowed to be here; and as long as he didn’t act overtly suspicious, there wasn’t much that they could do.  Their own damn hospitality was their undoing.

In any case, he wasn’t going to have to wriggle his way through awkward-ass situations like this for much longer, was he?

He jammed his thumb against the elevator button for the eighth floor, closed his eyes, and wondered if this elevator was actually especially bad, or if the stomach-lurch feeling was exacerbated by his psychological state.  Didn’t really take a medical degree to make a guess at that one.

He was in one of those weird limbo-time stretches where everything was happening excruciatingly slowly and way too fast all at once—he simultaneously wanted to get this shit over with as soon as humanly possible and dreaded it with every last damn fiber of his being.

Long, long hall; ugly, ugly carpet.  Door 812.  Door 814.  Door 816.

818.  Bingo or some shit.

He tilted his head back, took a deep breath, reached one leaden arm out, and knocked.

Five seconds later—he counted—the door swung open.  Soph was down to his slacks and his shirt—still tucked in, but with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows.

Ed could already smell the food, and it smelled fucking _killer_ , and he was a fucking moron for not having eaten before he came.  First off, it was going to make him less rational; second, he’d feel guilty as fuck if he gave in and ate any, but it’d be almost as bad to waste it.

Was that the whole point?  Was that what Soph had been doing all a-fucking-long?  And like a fucking _kid_ who didn’t know any better, Ed had just—believed it?

He felt like he was plummeting in slow-mo from a fucking skyscraper, and it was only a matter of time before he kissed the cement.

“Come on,” Soph said.  He put a hand on Ed’s shoulder—lightly, lightly—and drew him in over the threshold.  “We’re not exactly strangers, Ed.  Why are you so tense?”

“Just tired,” Ed said.  It sounded weak and fake and stupid, but what the hell else was he supposed to say?  “Just—can we just—”

“Have you had anything for dinner yet?” Soph asked.  One hand stayed on Ed’s shoulder, and the other swept grandly to indicate the enormous room service feast laid out on the table.  “I ordered some of your favorites.”

Ed looked at Soph for a long couple seconds, acutely aware of the flick of his own heartbeat in his throat.  Was that a genuine gesture of affection, or was that another little guilt-noose to sling around Ed’s ankles or his wrists or his fucking neck?  Was he just being paranoid and untrusting and aloof or some shit?  What if he had it all wrong, and this was just—what if Soph was just trying, in the best way he knew how, to be generous and loving; and maybe he just went a little overboard sometimes, and maybe—

Was it just Ed?  Was it always just going to be _Ed_?  Did he ask too much, or expect the impossible, or—what?  Did he drive people to this, somehow?  Or was ‘this’ totally fucking reasonable by everyone else’s standards but his own, and he was off living in some fucking dreamworld with gay-ass Disney princes, and what the fuck did he _think_ was gonna happen when the stupid fucking castle animation faded out?

“I’m okay,” Ed said.  He was such a bad fucking liar; a four-year-old would’ve called bullshit right now.  “Um—do you—you want to sit down, or…?”

They couldn’t have this conversation standing, right?  There had to be some sort of relationship rule about that.

Soph shut the door.  He didn’t deadbolt it in one slow, deliberate turn of his hand; or swing the little bar shut with a loudly ominous creak, but Ed had to resist the urge to flinch all the same.

He had to keep thinking about that—about how fucking fundamentally wrong it was to be scared of someone you were in love with.  About how the rest of it didn’t make a fucking difference if he felt like a rabbit in a fucking snare with a wolf pack closing in every time Soph’s eyes were on him.

“Are you sure you’re not hungry?” Soph asked.  “You insist on taking such poor care of yourself; you should have—”

The words burst out of Ed’s mouth as something in him finally just snapped: “I don’t think we should do this anymore.”

Soph blinked at him.  Dead neutral, fucking unreadable, expression entirely composed.

“Do what, exactly?” he asked.  “Is this hotel not up to your rigorous standards?”

The venom of the sarcasm in that fucking _burned_ —like acid on bare skin.  As the resident clumsy-ass scientist, Ed would know.

“No,” he said.  He tried at a gesture; words were fucking failing him, like they always did.  Soph raised one eyebrow real slow at the way he was waving at the space between them.  “ _This_.  Just— _us_.  It’s not—I mean, I don’t think it’s—working.”

Soph was standing between Ed and the door.  Of fucking course he was.  How much of it had Ed not even noticed before now?

Soph folded his arms across his chest.  The fucking eyebrow was still the only thing that had shifted on his face.  “Pray tell, then: precisely how is it supposed to work?”

“I don’t know,” Ed said, helplessly, scrabbling for something solid, but—what the fuck was he supposed to say?  He’d never gotten this right before; he’d never felt like he was in a fucking movie, and the whole world suddenly made sense, or whatever revelatory shit love was meant to confer on you when you found it.  “I just—I know what— _doesn’t_ work, and right now I’m just—fucking exhausted and miserable all the time, and—I mean—that’s not your _fault_ ; that’s not what I’m saying; it’s just—”

He tried to rake his hand through his hair, but it was shaking so hard he sort of got tangled, which was so fucking embarrassing he could feel the blood flooding into his cheeks.

“Just—” he forced out.  “What you want, what you need, out of—a relationship—right now—I can’t… give you that.  I just can’t.  Not with how my life is.  And that’s—that doesn’t mean there’s anything—you’re not wrong to want it, but I just—I can’t do it.  I can’t do this; I’m too… I gotta take care of my shit, and right now I _can’t_.  A-and Al keeps saying—I mean, he thinks I’m—falling apart, or something; he thinks it’s too much of a strain, he said, because—he said I always try to be what other people need because I want to make people happy, but this time it’s—kind of—damaging, psychologically, I guess; it’s—fucking me up pretty bad to be trying so hard with so little of _me_ left to give, and—”

“You mentioned that your brother has never had an intimate relationship,” Soph said, face blank, eyelids low.  “What could he possibly know about what you and I have together?”

Keeping a hold of his thoughts was like trying to grasp at fucking shrubs and roots and shit in the midst of a mudslide, and Ed was two seconds from going under.  “Well—I mean, he knows _me_ better than anybody else, and—and Winry said the same thing, actually; she’s got—she’s had a couple of—”

“I was under the impression,” Soph said, “that you weren’t the type to let other people dictate the direction of your life.”

Ed wanted to say stupid shit—shit like _I don’t have to justify myself to you_ ; shit like _I’m fucking unhappy, that’s reason enough_.  But it wasn’t, and he did.  Soph had given him—all kinds of shit,so much food and so much affection and so much great sex; you couldn’t just discount that the second something happened that you didn’t like.

“I’m sure we could work out some of the difficulties,” Soph said.  “I thought you billed yourself as an individual who doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘quit’.”

It was always knives and nails and needles when Soph was getting angry—tiny blades so sharp you almost didn’t feel them until he started to twist.

“Well—I mean, yeah,” Ed got out, “but this is—different, this is—I just think there are—fundamental differences in what we’re looking for, and it’s not fair to you or to me to keep trying to force it to fit when it’s just—when the shapes aren’t right, and—”

“Interesting,” Soph said, and somehow the tonelessness was as brutal as a shout.  “Somehow I’d just assumed that this meant something to you.  Apparently—”

“Stop saying that,” Ed said.  “Don’t just—don’t change around— _listen_ , okay?  Please.  Nobody—nobody did anything—wrong; it’s just—this isn’t working, and I don’t think it’s gonna work, and I really—care about you—but—I think we’ll both be a lot happier if we quit trying to make this into stuff it can’t be and just… move on.”

A narrow smile curled one corner of Soph’s familiar mouth.  “You don’t get to decide what makes me happy, Ed.”

Ed was going to tear his hair out.  He was.  And then he’d be bald and bleeding from the scalp, and he wouldn’t have to worry about anyone wanting to date him ever again.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said.  “You know that’s not what I meant; I just—”

“Fine,” Soph said.

Ed’s heart stuttered hard.

“If you don’t think there’s anything we can do to continue to benefit from the considerable amount of time and energy we’ve both put into this,” Soph said, and the wince cut into the lining of Ed’s stomach long before it made it up to his face, “then I suppose we should put it on hold.”

Ed couldn’t quite believe he was hearing this.  That sounded—that sounded like Soph… giving in.  He _never_ gave in; he never gave any damn quarter—he was like a dog with a fucking rope toy in his teeth once he set his mind on something.  He always held out and spun it around and clung on and kept pushing—gently, but consistent, so that you couldn’t ignore it, and nothing else could take precedence—until you finally caved just to get him to leave it the fuck alone.  That was his M.O.  Ed had accepted it; it wasn’t a big deal; it was just part of who he was, which made this… weird.  Unprecedented.

Suspicious.

Ed swallowed twice and jimmied the thinnest remainders of his voice out past the knot occupying his throat.  “Okay.”

“There’s no sense wasting all of this, though,” Soph said, sweeping a hand out towards the table.  His eyes fixed on Ed’s collarbones, then on his wrists, then… lower.  “Or,” he said, nodding to the bed this time, “all of _that_.”

Whatever was happening in Ed’s chest more or less felt like breathing, but it wasn’t having the desired effect of distributing oxygen to his body and encouraging higher functions in his brain.

“Oh, come,” Soph said.  “Haven’t you ever heard of ‘one more for the road’ in situations like this?  It’s traditional.”

Ed swallowed again.  Was there a Guinness record for this sort of shit within a single conversation?  He was probably getting close.

“Traditional,” he said, like slowing down the syllables would force them to make sense.

Soph stepped towards him—Ed didn’t, _didn’t_ recoil—and raised a hand to graze all five fingertips down along his jaw.  “That’s right,” he said.  “It’s the best way I can think of to say goodbye.  It’ll give both of us a sense of closure.”

What was he supposed to say?  _Fuck your closure; I want to get out of here_?  _Your feelings are fucking irrelevant_?  The first was true; the second wasn’t, but the first would sound like the second anyway, and—just—

He hadn’t done enough swallowing for today, right?

“Okay,” he said.  “I… okay.”

“It’ll be a great deal more than just ‘okay’,” Soph said.  His fingertips skated down the side of Ed’s neck and curled into the fabric of his T-shirt.  “You know better than that.”

Ed closed his eyes, and Soph’s mouth ghosted up his throat.  “Y-yeah.  Sorry.  Yeah.”

This was good.  Soph was good—good at _this_ , good at making him _feel_ good, good at dragging his soul up into a layer of boiling steam just underneath his skin, good at waiting until it shredded his insides before tearing it out of him in a single stream—

This was going to be good.  This was going to be fine.  Which was—which made him feel—like a thief, like he was fucking stealing, like he’d refused to give up the good stuff with the not-good, like he was cheating at this—

Like a fucking slut for accepting sex when he was trying to cut all the strings.

“I don’t—” he said.  Soph’s elegant, long-fingered hands settled on his waist, slid down, and cinched in around his hipbones.  Ed tried to force his eyelids up; the weight of his heartbeat in them made them so fucking heavy.  “Could we—not?  I don’t—feel—right, I—”

“Relax,” Soph said, breath hot on his throat, fingers curling into the bottom hem of his shirt.  “Nothing to be ashamed of.”

“It’s not—” Off came the shirt; black cotton crumpled on the tactful beige carpet.  “—I’m not—”

“Hush,” Soph breathed into his ear.  Teeth grazed the shell; a tongue grazed the lobe, and his knees went jellied underneath him.  Apparently he did want it, whatever he said.  So apparently he deserved whatever was coming to him.

Soph was guiding him backwards—the backs of his knees met the edge of the bed, and his weight tipped, and he was down on the mattress, and his eyes were popping open on instinct.

A section of Soph’s silky hair had slipped loose from the ponytail; Ed wanted to card his fingers through it, savor the smoothness; it was beautiful—really, it was—but Soph always got this look like it bothered him when Ed clung onto him, and wasn’t the point of all of this to end the whole thing on a high note—?

“I suppose this is our last chance, isn’t it?” Soph murmured into his ear, running a few fingertips lightly down the top of his thigh.  “There is one thing I’ve been meaning to try.”

Soph drew back—his pupils were blown, and the intensity of his gaze sent chills chasing up and down Ed’s spine.  Ed’s mouth was so fucking arid you would’ve needed a dune buggy to cross his tongue.

“Yeah?” he said.

“Yes,” Soph said, dragging his hand down Ed’s bare chest to fix it on his belt buckle.  He trailed it back up again, and then down—this time with his fingernails digging in a touch.  “We discussed it; you sounded receptive.”

There was a small Sahara in Ed’s throat and lungs—no, wait.  A _large_ Sahara.  Enormous.  Pretty much the same size as the real one.

“Sorry, I—” It was a wonder he wasn’t spitting sand.  “I forget—what—?”

“Knives, my sweet boy,” Soph whispered into the underside of his chin, forcing his head back, forcing his throat out.  “You said—” Ed remembered. “—‘One of these days, sure’.”

Which had meant _I don’t think I like that idea, because I’m scared of you sometimes, which is also the reason I can’t say ‘no’_.

Ed could no longer recall a time in his life when he’d had sufficient saliva.  “I…”

“I have them in the car,” Soph said, softly, and then the tip of his tongue glided up the ridges of Ed’s throat.  “Shall I get them?”

Ed kept trying to inhale, but the oxygen just wouldn’t fucking stick in his lungs, and he was staring up at Soph’s serene little smile, and—

It clicked.

“Yeah,” he gasped out.  “G-go ahead and get ’em.”

“Lovely,” Soph said, with that purring undertone—like a satiated animal.  He leaned in again, nipped Ed’s neck just under his ear— “Hold that thought.”

Ed was going to hold that thought right out the fucking door and then drop it eight floors and get the fuck out of here and never, ever come back.

“Okay,” he said with the paltry remains of his voice.

“Ah,” Soph said, and the tone was regret now, but nothing pointed, nothing real; “parting is such sweet sorrow.”

Soph shifted back from where Ed was splayed out on the edge of the bed, moved to his little overnight bag by the dresser, rummaged for a second, and drew out—

—handcuffs.

Bright-gleaming silver and a narrow chain; _solid_ metal; totally legit; and you could buy anything you fucking wanted on the internet these days, couldn’t you?

How fucking convenient.

Soph stepped towards Ed again, and Ed’s heart started slamming so fast he couldn’t breathe around it—like a fist on a door in the dead of night; like the end of days had come, and the only hope for restitution lay behind _this_ bolted fucking barrier—

And he was so _cold_ —the room hadn’t been cold a second ago, had it?  Soph’s hands had been cool, maybe, but Ed’s skin had been flushing; he’d been—well, he’d been worked up, after all, and that always set his blood to singing through his veins so fast he basically heated up like a car engine, and—but it was _cold_ now; he was fucking freezing; he couldn’t feel his fingertips; that shouldn’t have been—

He was trying to scramble back on the bed, but his fucking hands weren’t working; his fingers were completely fucking numb, and he couldn’t see quite right; the edges of his vision had blurred.  He thought he was actually going to choke on his own fucking heart, which should’ve been a medical impossibility, but it felt like—it felt—

“Easy,” Soph murmured, and it wasn’t like they hadn’t done a little bit of ropes-and-ribbons shit before; it wasn’t like this was new, really—it didn’t make sense, but Ed was just—he _couldn’t_ —he—

Soph caught his right wrist and tugged hard, and he felt one warning twinge from his shoulder, and it only ever got worse from there, so he tried to wriggle up the bed to make it so Soph wouldn’t have to wrench his fucking arm off to cuff him to the bedframe, but at the same time, breathing was like _sobbing_ , short and high and weak and useless, and he couldn’t think right; he couldn’t—

He didn’t want to be here; he didn’t want to be _anywhere_ , but this was the worst place in the world—but if he didn’t cooperate, everything would just hurt more—

His body wasn’t listening to his brain; he tried to make his thoughts louder, tried to _howl_ at his own muscles to force them to move—but the nerve signals just wouldn’t fucking fire; the messages wouldn’t run; he managed a weak half-shiver, and then—

Soph released his arm, grabbed his hips, leaned down to kiss one of the little bruises just above the top hem of his jeans, and hiked him further up the bed.  He didn’t know hearts could beat this fast; he didn’t know blood could pump with this kind of urgency, and he was—what the fuck _was_ he?  What was it that heart attacks were supposed to feel like?  There was an arrhythmic stabbing pain in the center of his chest; there was a tornado in his brain—

Cold metal cinched in around his right wrist, and the nerve in his shoulder squalled, and the other cuff rattled as Soph closed it with a sharp _c-c-click_ around the first wrought iron bar of the bedframe.

No, no, _nonononoplease_ —

“Wait,” Ed choked out, and why couldn’t he fucking _move_?  “W-wait, d-don’t—”

He didn’t even know what he wanted to ask; he just couldn’t be here like this, not now, not with his whole body rebelling, not with his fucking heart poised to explode—

His face felt hot even though his hands were frozen; did Soph think he was enjoying this because he was blushing, or—?

He was dying; he had to be fucking dying; that was the only explanation for how fucking haywire every single last fucking one of his vital systems had gone; he was going to fucking _die_ in a fucking hotel room handcuffed to the fucking bed, and Al would be all alone, and he’d _said_ it; he’d said _Don’t go by yourself, Brother, don’t be stupid, don’t take risks_ —and like every other fucking time, Ed’d ignored him, because he was the smart, independent big brother; because he knew better; because he knew his limits; because he was a selfish fucking prick who prioritized his own fucking pride over the safety of his family, and he _deserved_ this; he deserved _all_ of it—

Soph’s hands grazed against his skin again, skimming down his stomach to unbutton his jeans and drag the zipper down slow, like he was savoring it; he was casting bedroom eyes-y looks up at Ed as he hauled them off—and usually Ed contorted his spine as much as he needed to lift his hips up, to make it easier, and he felt the instinct for it sparking somewhere in the hazy, screaming muddle of his brain, but he couldn’t tap into it; he couldn’t _do_ anything—his heart was ricocheting around his whole fucking body, and his throat had contracted smaller than a plastic fucking drinking straw; he couldn’t— _breathe_ —

Soph yanked his shoes off, too, and dumped everything on the floor; he ran those elegant fucking hands up the insides of Ed’s legs—faint pressure from his fingernails; light scraping all the way upward until he reached the bottom of Ed’s boxers.  He curled his fingers into them slowly and then dragged those down, too, and Ed couldn’t even fucking _see_ through the fear for a second—like all the jittering, fluttering, swooping thoughts had solidified into a single curtain that had slapped into his face, and no matter what he did, no matter how he fought it, no matter how he tried and tried to push it or part it or sweep it aside—he just— _couldn’t_ —and—

Soph kissed his knee, and then that spot of warmth disappeared.

“Just like that,” Soph’s voice said, and Ed could almost—there was a thread out in the ether; he tried to grasp it; he could _almost_ focus on Soph’s face—

But—

Then nothing, then footsteps, then a door slamming, then—

All he knew was that he had to get out of here—had to get the _fuck_ out; he was either dying, or he was going to be dying, or he would if he stayed, or—

There was something _wrong_ with him, and there had been something wrong with Soph fucking Kimblee all along, and he’d just been too fucking lovestruck to see it—

He was handcuffed naked to a hotel bed, and there was something wet on his face and his neck and his collarbones, and his shoulder was throbbing, and his heart wouldn’t stop skittering like dead leaves in a sharp wind, and he couldn’t _breathe_ —

He just—

Al.

He had to get to Al.

It’d be okay; Al would make it okay; Al always made it okay.

He could do it; he had to.

He just—

One breath; that was all he needed; one fucking breath; he was Edward fucking _Elric_ , and he’d been through worse; he could do this; his fucked-up, stupid body couldn’t stop him; let it fucking _try_ —

He dragged in the oxygen and held it in his lungs, squeezing his eyes shut, listening to his heartbeat.  Systole, diastole; they were both for Al.  Every fucking cardiac muscle contraction was for that fucking kid—that perfect fucking kid; the only good thing he’d ever been a part of.  Al had the best smile of anybody on Earth—in the first half-second, it was so tiny, like he didn’t even know how to express his own happiness, but then it’d just _bloom_ , and next thing you knew, he was beaming, and the room lit up, and the world made sense, and—

Al.

He could do this.

He could, and he would, because Al needed him.  Al needed him to make it home.

It was a fucking war with his fucking heart and lungs and spinning brain—a fucking battle every fucking second; drums and cannons and bayonets.  He rallied every last goddamn fragment of his fractured little being, and he opened his eyes, and he sucked in a deeper breath than the last one, and he planted his left hand on the mattress and levered himself up.

He sat.  He swallowed, hard.  He looked at the shining silver contraption trapping him here.

He had a tiny flathead screwdriver in his wallet, but his jeans were too far away for him to reach it; he could’ve maybe jimmied the lock with the tongue of his belt buckle, but same fucking problem.  He fixed his eyes on the nightstand by the bed.  Nothing useful was evident; he reached over and checked the drawer, but the only fucking thing in it was the obligatory Bible.  Nice and fucking ironic, but you couldn’t pick a lock with a couple flimsy-ass pages of scripture, so…

So.

He tried unscrewing the switch on the bedside lamp, in case its connecting pieces were the right shape, but no fucking dice; it wouldn’t even come loose.  What else?  What fucking _else_?

His heart wouldn’t stop pounding, and he couldn’t chase the thought out of his head that he was having some kind of fucking reaction that was going to kill him.

But not yet.  Later.  He’d have time for all that dying shit later; not fucking _now_.

He shook the cuff experimentally and got a nice little chiming ring out of the steel.  Fucking police-grade shit.  Maybe he would’ve had a hope in hell with a pair of pliers, but his bare hands wouldn’t do jackshit against the links of the chain or the joins of the cuffs.

He gasped in enough partial breaths to make up a whole one, held it, and then stood up on the mattress.  He set both feet against the lowest bar of the headboard, wrapped both hands around the chain, and started leaning back.

How long did he fucking have?  Soph had to… what?  Walk down the hall, take the elevator down eight floors, walk out of the lobby, cross the parking lot to his car, unlock it, collect his fucking murder tools, presumably conceal them in some way in case the useless fucking staff reasoned that a man whistling a cheery tune with a bunch of gleaming knives in his hands was vaguely suspicious, walk back, take the elevator eight floors up—

How long had Ed spent fucking blind with panic?

He didn’t have time to try to pry this fucking thing apart.

He had to get out of here; he had to get _out_ ; he just—

Whatever it took.

Anything.

Soph hadn’t quite locked the cuff as tight as it would go—there was enough of a gap for Ed to shift it right up to the juncture of his thumb.

He pushed it up as far towards his fingers as it would go, tucked his thumb in, closed his eyes, let go of the chain, braced his feet against the bars of the headboard, and threw himself backwards as hard as he could.

The edge of the steel dug deep into the meat of his thumb, and his heart kept finding a way—somehow—to gallop faster, harder, an earthquake in his throat, shaking his ribcage, thundering through him—

The breath ripped out of him, scalded on the way back in; too fast, too hard, too hot; he was choking on it, but he couldn’t _stop_.

He twisted his hand as violently as he could bear—pushed with both legs, heard the iron bedframe creak under the strain—

Something hot slipped down his wrist; the steel bit deeper still—he leaned back, gritted his teeth, latched onto his right forearm with his left hand—

_Hauled_ with everything he fucking _had_ because he _couldn’t fucking stay here he had to get out he had t_ —

A sick popping sound, and then a scrape, and the pain overwhelmed everything; blood sprayed over the white sheets; he fell free of the handcuff, and his momentum flung him backwards almost off the mattress; he landed on his back, bounced once, lay with his head extended past the foot of the bed, and stared up at the ceiling open-mouthed, distantly aware that his hand had caught fire—

There wasn’t time.

He scrambled up; it was so fucking _cold_ except for his right hand.  He had to put some fucking clothes on, but there wasn’t—how long could he possibly have before Soph—?

His knees gave way under him the second he tried to stand unaided, and he tumbled to the carpet; he wanted to fucking _cry_ —but, y’know, no fucking time; just no fucking _time_ —

With a trace of fascination, he noticed he was leaving bloody handprints as he crawled over to his jeans.  He felt bad for the maids that’d get stuck with this room tomorrow.  All the skin on both sides of his right hand had torn the fuck off with the handcuff; some of it had ripped away clean, but there was still a thick flap hanging from the left side.  His thumb was sort of… dangling, limply, in a way that would’ve probably disconcerted the fuck out of him if he’d had any goddamn mental energy to spare, but all of it—every figment of a thought; every flash of a fucking neuron—he’d channeled towards moving, dragging, forcing, scrabbling, _getting the fuck out of this place_ —

Pants first.  Then the rest of this shit.

He swung himself around and shoved his feet into the legs of his jeans.  His knees still felt like somebody’d clubbed them with a fucking crowbar; he was just going to have to lock the joints and figure it out; he’d just… it was fine.  He was going to be fine.

He hiked himself back onto his ass—using his back as much as he could, because putting weight on his hand sent spears through his shoulder and daggers up his wrist—and wriggled into the jeans, then half-zipped them on the third try; his left hand kept shaking like a motherfucker, even though it wasn’t the one dripping all over the floor.

He grabbed up his T-shirt and gave himself three seconds— _one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three_ —to find the collar.  When it fucking eluded him, he jammed his left hand into the bottom, snaked it around until his fingers went through some hole, and slung it up to his elbow.  He’d put it on later; there just wasn’t _time_ —

It took every last fucking ounce of pigheaded willpower—and a major assist from the desk chair—to drag himself upright.  His knees wavered again; _fuck_ his cartilage; he set his jaw and tilted his weight back until they stuck, and then he pressed his right hand into the shirt tangled over his left and fucking marched his ass over to the window.

He probably would’ve done it even if there hadn’t been a fire escape.  He would’ve—something.  Décor, molding, nicks in the paint; he would’ve found something, and if he hadn’t, he would’ve eaten pavement from eight floors up before he _stayed_ in this fucking place.

This room looked out over the back parking lot, which was almost empty—no black fucking Lexus, anyway, and that was what mattered; Soph must’ve parked in front.  He could do it; he could _do_ this, he could—

The handle stuck—or had he finally drained out the last of his fucking strength?  Or was it literal fucking window dressing having a latch there at all, and this was one of those fucking safety windo—

Fire escape.  It had to open; there were fucking laws.

How much of his maybe-five minutes did he have left?

He pushed the T-shirt back, ground his teeth _hard_ , grabbed the handle with both hands, and threw his weight into this one, too, and—

With a fucking shudder and then a creak—

The bottom half of the pane angled open a crack, and then he planted both palms on it and _pushed_ —so much for the stealth T-shirt plan now; he was smearing his fingerprints all over the fucking glass—until there was a foot or so of space, enough to grab the sill, lift his body one more time, and roll it over—

For one irrational second he knew—he _knew_ , in his guts, in his _soul_ —that the deck of the fire escape was going to give way, and he’d go _all_ the way down.

He landed on his fucking spine on cold metal, staring at the open sky, and lay there winded for waytoo long.  He gasped; he choked; he didn’t have time to search for air; he contorted his reluctant muscles again—bloody hand first on the nearest ladder rung—his vision narrowed to the black paint flaking off the cheap metal, and he closed his other fist around it, too.  Just a million more of these.  That wasn’t so much—not standing between him and survival; that wasn’t so much.

He pulled himself over, stuck his bare feet out—he was just sort of kicking stupidly for a second, then he found purchase, then he shifted his weight—his right hand was _screaming_ , and his shoulder was past sounds and into lights too bright to see; he couldn’t think about it; couldn’t give it time; couldn’t give the pain any power over his mind—

He was still breathing.  He was still breathing, and he was going to make it out of this if it fucking _killed_ him, and he was going home to Al—

He counted the rungs.  He watched his own fingers curl around every one; he glared at them so they wouldn’t fucking let go without him, not on his goddamn fucking watch.  The pattern of blood crusting on his knuckles around the way they bent was fascinating; fluid was a funny thing.  Drips chased each other down his arm and dove into the endless open air below; he estimated their velocity by the time they splattered on the ground.

Thirty-four.

Thirty-five.

Thirty-six.

His right hand was so slick with the blood now he had to take extra care to compensate with the other hand and both of his feet—if he relied on its grip, he’d slide, and his weight would go.  It was okay.  That was what he had three other fucking limbs for, after all.

Thirty-seven.

One more.

One _more_ , and then it was close enough that whoever designed these fucking things had cut it off, figuring people could just jump the rest of the way, apparently; had that asshole figured on bare feet and Jell-O knees?  Ed thought not.

Thirty-eight.

Thirty-eight, and he just—

Braced himself, let go, _fell_ —

The sting of the pavement on the soles of his feet barely even registered.  Landing on his ass jarred his tailbone so bad he saw stars, though, so that charted on the scale.

He flattened both hands on the concrete to lever himself up, immediately regretted it, and followed through anyway.  No fucking choice.  No fucking time.  There wouldn’t be any damn mystery where he’d gone; he’d left a fucking trail a lot more goddamn durable than breadcrumbs—and more personalized, too, for fuck’s sake.

One ragged breath; two ragged breaths; he stood up and shouldered his shirt on, trying to look up to the eighth-floor window at the same time.  It had to’ve been long enough by now, but Soph wasn’t sticking his fucking head out, and there was no one on the ladder, so—maybe—just— _maybe_ —

Shirt on, jeans buttoned, presence and functional capacity of phone confirmed—one more breath, one long second with his eyes closed, and then he clenched both hands into fists and started running.

He didn’t really know this fucking area, and he didn’t really care—there was a road out past the parking lot, and beyond that there was something that looked like a park; past that, some suburban shit.  He was okay.  He was going to be okay.  He wanted to throw up; he wanted to lie down; but there wasn’t time for either, so he was just going to have to be okay first, and then—later—when he got back to Al—

He ran.

He clutched his bleeding hand to his chest, clenched his jaw tight, and made his miserable body carry itself forward—just a little further, just a little longer, just a little deeper into the beautiful, beautiful, anonymous safety of the spreading night.

He ran until he’d passed more houses than he could count; until the turns he’d taken had tangled up even the vaguest concept of a map inside his head.  He ran until he couldn’t tell what part of this was ravaging his heartbeat.

And then just a few more steps.

Just a few more squares of sidewalk; just a few more jagged breaths searing up and down inside his throat.

Just…

A little…

More…

And…

There was an oak tree in front of one of the picturesque cottage-looking houses.  He’d put what felt like a mile and a half—so maybe three-quarters of one, if he was lucky, realistically speaking, right?—between himself and that fucking hotel; there were rows and rows of houses in the way, and he’d turned onto random streets half a dozen times and followed them to other ones and did his absolute damnedest to disappear into the suburban maze.

This was as good a place as any, and the tree reminded him of the one that had used to stand in front of the house they grew up in, and he reached it, reached out to it, and just sort of… crumbled.

Maybe the roots really did sort of cradle him; maybe it was just his stupid fucking imagination.

He had to twist around enough to put his left hand into his right pocket and pull out his phone again.

He had six missed calls from Soph.

His stomach churned—like some fucking Charybdis-level shit—and there were white spots in front of his eyes for a second, and his heart turned over and sputtered like a car engine when you really ground the ignition, but—

He just—

Swiped past with his shaky thumb and tapped over to Al, to Al’s fucking gorgeous fucking face on the speed-dial list, and held the phone up to his ear.

He didn’t even hear a whole ring before the line caught.

“Brother?” Al asked, and the shard of terror in his voice buried itself in the center of Ed’s chest and lodged there, radiating cold.

“Yeah,” he grated out.  “Who’d you think?”

“Are you okay?” Al asked.  He cleared his throat, like the gesture would travel back in time and stop Ed from having heard the tremble.  “Where are you?”

“Uh,” Ed said, to both, “long story.”  And then, to the latter, because the former was a mess: “Some… place.  I—need you to come pick me up, if you can; I… it’s… fucked up.  Everything’s all fucked up, but it’s okay; I’m—fine.  It’s some little housing development or something.”  He had to think.  He had to keep this shit together; he was the big brother; this was his job.  He swallowed, closed his eyes, forced himself to smile.  “Hang on.  I’ll map myself.  Okay?”

“Yeah,” Al said softly.  “Okay.  I can be there in just a couple minutes.”

Probably he should’ve gotten up and, y’know, looked at a fucking street sign or something, but for once he was giving himself a pass on the indolent technology shortcut thing.  Plus this way he could send the pin on the map right to Al, and there was no chance of Al ending up with the wrong intersection on his GPS.

“Got it,” Al said.  “Shouldn’t be more than—ten minutes?  I’ll, um.  Drive fast.”

Ed wanted to laugh.  Ed wanted to part his lips and let the joy pour out, because his beautiful baby brother never drove a _hair_ over the speed limit, but for Ed—for his fuckup-failure sibling—Al was volunteering to bend the rules.

In a way, that was about the sweetest thing anyone had ever said to him.

“Okay,” Ed said.  “I—love you, kid.  Okay?”

“I love you, too, dummy,” Al said.  “Sit tight.”

Ed hung up, and draped himself over the roots, and stared up through the lattice of oak tree leaves, and was sort of relieved and sort of disappointed that he was just too exhausted to cry.

He slammed the brakes on the rush of adrenaline the first time he heard a car engine rumble by on the sleepy street, headlights swanning through the dark—and the second, and the third.  On the unthinkable off-chance it was Soph, better not to attract his attention with movement anyway.  If Al had altered the laws of space-time in his hurry to get here, he wouldn’t just leave again without texting, at least.

After eight minutes or so, Ed managed to stand up and look at the road, and everything hurt like _hell_.  It was sort of a good thing, in a way; once he’d finally wrangled his body into an upright position, he didn’t dare to set it down in case he’d never be able to coax it to its feet again.

He peeked around the oak as a familiar engine growl puttered closer, and his knees just about fucking telescoped—had there ever, ever been a more beautiful sight than Alphonse Elric’s washed-out face past the windshield of Mom’s old piece of shit Volkswagen?

He had to open the door with his left hand, obviously, and he tried to tuck the right in against his stomach so that it was sort of below Al’s sightline, because it was still bleeding sluggishly all over everything.  Al, of course, wasn’t quite that easy to distract—on top of which he was actively looking for shit that’d gone wrong, which sort of made sense, given the circumstances.

Didn’t make it any easier to have to see the abject horror in his widening eyes.

“What did he _do_ to you?”  And there was the voice breaking, and the telltale gleam at the bottom corners of Al’s eyes as they filled up, and he fought it, gripping the steering wheel way too tight, but it was obvious that he was going to lose.

“It’s fine,” Ed said, which admittedly was pretty fucking stupid.  He slammed the car door too fast in his dumbass eagerness and banged his knee, which just about fucking figured.  Maybe that’d hurt tomorrow, if he slipped back under his maxed-out pain threshold at some point.  He started to reach out with his right hand and remembered to switch when he saw all the crusty crap coating his arm like a fucking glove.  This was getting to be some serious second-rate horror movie shit.

In any case, he touched Al’s arm with his less-disgusting hand and looked his perfect baby brother in the eyes.

“Let’s just go,” he said.

Al managed a hitching breath, nodded firmly, and then put his foot on the gas.

Ed got about forty seconds of silence, give or take.  His sense of time was beyond fucked at this point; the relief was like a fucking drug trip, and his brain was swimming in it.

“It’s just—” Al said.  He stopped neatly at a light—applying gradual pressure to the pedals of a car was not one of Ed’s fortes; it had always baffled him that Al was so careful and precise and shit when _Ed_ was the one who’d semi-legally taught him how to drive—and frowned at the steering wheel.

Ed braced himself, but there wasn’t any preparing for this sort of thing, was there?

“I could have—” Al’s eyes shone with the start of the tears, and Ed’s heart contracted to a cold spot of nothing—like a black hole, like a time bomb, like a single stone in the fucking tundra, buried in the snow.  “I could have stopped it,” Al said, and his voice caught, and then it shattered, and the first tear slipped out of the corner of his right eye and rolled down over his cheek.  “I should’ve insisted you let me go with you; I could’ve _been_ there; I—”

“ _No_ , Al,” Ed said, settling for grabbing Al’s wrist instead of his hand, since there wasn’t any goddamn way Al would release his ten-and-two grip on the wheel anyway.  “It was—fucking—it was something I had to do by myself, and—”

“It’s not,” Al said.  The light changed, and green glowed on the wet tracks on his face, and he accelerated slowly and smoothly even though he was flat-out fucking crying now.  If there was some fucking God, the dude must’ve been _pissed_ about the absentee angel that had ended up here.  “That’s b—that’s a stupid… idea.  Concept.  _Thing_.  That’s a stupid thing.  There’s _nothing_ you have to do by yourself, Brother; that’s the whole point—of me, us, of having a _f-family_ , Ed, that’s—”

“I didn’t want you there,” Ed said, dropping back against his seat.  “He would’ve lost his shit.”

Al let go of two-o’-clock long enough to wave his hand at Ed’s bloody arm.  “What do you call this?”

“He didn’t—” Ed had to fight the urge to run his filthy-ass hand over his face.  He could already feel the prickle and pull of a spatter that had dried on his forehead—he should’ve figured.  “He—okay, he handcuffed me to the bed and—”

“Stole your sh-shoes?” Al asked.  His knuckles were white around the wheel, and two more tears spilled out as he blinked, but there was an anger in it now.

“Well—yeah.”  Al wasn’t dumb; he’d get six from a pair of threes, and Ed didn’t exactly want to spell it out.  “So he—then he left, and—and I freaked out.  I dunno, I just—I fucking lost it; I thought—” _I was dying._ “I dunno, I was fucking—losing it.  Just… no higher fucking function, just _—animal_ panic, I dunno, and… I was like ‘Fuck this shit, I’m out of here,’ so I… got out.”

A trio of threes made nine, and he didn’t need to say _I would’ve chewed my own fucking arm off if I’d had to, right about then._

“I knew he was messed up,” Al said.  His eyes were on the road, and they were hardening; all the tear wetness somehow went cold—oceans were saline, too, after all, and sometimes ships weren’t ever seen again.  “I knew he was rotten underneath; I could hearit in his voice, and I shouldn’t have—I shouldn’t have stood by while he _tortured_ you, no matter what you said—”

Ed leaned his head back and stared at the ceiling—or, really, the inside of the roof, since all of the lining had long since peeled off.  “It wasn’t—I mean, mostly it was—fine—”

“Like hell it was!” Al snapped, and Ed sat up straight—even a G-rated curse word was way beyond the fucking pale for Al.  “I knew something was off about that guy, and I knew something was off about _you_ , and I should have stepped in a long time ago, before he did something like _this_!”

“I wouldn’t have let you,” Ed said, feeling—what?  Stupid?  Tired?  Numb?  As the words passed his lips, he knew they weren’t just consolation; they were true.  “I would’ve taken it like a challenge.  I always fucking do.”

Al was quiet but for shaking breaths for a while.

“I know,” he said at last.  “I know, and I knew, and that’s—that’s why I didn’t, but that doesn’t make it _okay_ ; that doesn’t undo—”

“Nothing’s gonna undo any of it,” Ed said.

Al took his other hand off the wheel this time to cover his mouth, but the sob that racked his shoulders and rattled out of his throat felt like a stab wound all the same.

“I know,” he said, gasping to get a breath in.  “I kn-know it’s not.”

“Hey,” Ed said, softer now, reaching with the cleaner hand to ruffle at Al’s hair.  “We’ve been through worse, kid.  We’re gonna be okay.”

“Yeah,” Al said, elbowing Ed’s arm away—gently, somehow; Ed sure as hell didn’t have that much control over his elbows—and then scrubbing at the tears.  Somehow the car didn’t veer so much as an inch.  “Just… why does it always have to be so darned hard?”

“Anything that’s worth it is,” Ed said.

Al’s breath was evening out.  At least there was that—at least there was fucking that.

Ed made a sincere effort to relax his shoulders, especially since the right one had taken up throbbing so bad that he might as well have jammed a rusty icepick into his own fucking arm, and looked ahead.

He blinked.

“Wait,” he said.  Neither of his arms cooperated with his desire to point at the passing turn.  “You missed the…” Thoughts slotted into place.  That was a nice fucking change, although the ones he got weren’t exactly moving in a favorable direction.  “Where the hell are we going?”

Al gave him the Look that Mom had never actually leveled on them—she’d only ever set its absolutely-no-bullshit frigidity on people who walked into her living room and drank her tea and told her that she should find another husband and get her life back on track; or the ones who said she should pray and make promises to Jesus or somebody to make the cancer go away; or the ones who asked if they could have a neighborly discount if she sold the house before she died.

The looks she gave to him and Al were different—even when she was really tired or really mad, there was always a gentleness to it that softened the reprimand a little bit.

Al, though, wasn’t pulling any fucking punches tonight.

“We’re going to the emergency room, Brother,” he said.

Ed knew in his gut that he was going to lose this one, but he had to try.  “ _Al_ ,” he said.  “No, come on—they’re too wide for stitches or any of that shit.  All they’re going to do is slap some band-aids on and then charge us a fucking grand for the privilege of hanging out in the waiting room for two fucking hours.  I just wanna go home.  I just want this to be over.  I don’t care; we can fix it up ourselves.”

“Ed,” Al said, “your thumb’s dislocated.”

“Well—yeah, but—”

“And the first thing I did when we accepted the offers for grad school here was check the health insurance.  ER visits are covered.”

“They can’t be _completely_ ; we’re gonna have—”

“Besides,” Al said, “even if we had to pay the whole thing out of pocket—” His voice was sliding precipitously into the thick, wet realm of quavering tears again.  Ed should’ve just—died.  Ed should’ve just died and saved everyone the trouble.  “—you’ve gone through _enough_ , Brother; I want you to get better; I want us to move on, and you can’t do that with your stupid thumb hanging off the side of your hand, and I’m not jamming that back into the joint myself and risking screwing your hand up for _life_ , and—”

“Okay!” Ed said as fast as he could when Al paused for a shuddering breath.  “Okay, we can go to the fucking ER and sit on our asses and hate the healthcare system and… okay.  Fine.”  To be fair, his thumb was sort of a fucking wreck.  Maybe.  It was hard to tell under all the blood.  Also, everything was swelling a little bit.  Maybe swelling a lot.  “Fine,” he said again, somewhat nobly, he felt.  “You—kind of have a point.  But—just—if anybody points a fucking needle at me, I reserve the right to get the fuck out of there.”  He slouched in the seat as low as he could go while keeping just a sliver of vision over the dashboard.  Depressingly, it didn’t take long.  “Been through enough fucking trauma for one day.”

“For one lifetime, I think,” Al said.

Ed had meant it kind of as a joke, but the whole thing landed flat.  His stomach roiled a little more.

Then it growled.

“Can we get some takeout on the way over?” he asked.  “Hospital food fucking sucks, and we could be waiting fucking _forever_ , and…”

“Only if you text Izumi and tell her you’re taking tomorrow off,” Al said.

“Can’t,” Ed said.

“You can,” Al said, “and you will.”

“I _can’t_ ,” Ed said.  “My flies’re gonna die.”

“With all due respect to the noble _Drosophila_ and its many contributions to the field of genetics,” Al said, “screw your stupid flies.”

Ed tried for the piteous whine.  “ _Aaaaaaal_.”

“You’re taking the day off to stay home and recuperate,” Al said.  “That’s final.”

Ed tried for the piteous whine at a higher pitch and volume.  “But _Aaaaaaaaaaal_ —”

“No,” Al said.

“I’ll go in for a half-day,” Ed said.  “Take it or leave it.  And if you leave it, I’m probably gonna climb out a window and hurt myself worse.”

“If you give me reason to suspect that you’re going to make a break for it,” Al said, “I’ll knock you out with NyQuil.”

Ed glared.

Al glared back.

“Half-day,” Ed said.

“Quarter-day,” Al said.

“Three-eighths day,” Ed said.

“And someone covers your next three bookstore shifts,” Al said.

“But—”

“You shouldn’t be lifting anything with your right hand anyway,” Al said.  “Brother, I swear, it’s like you’re _trying_ to destroy yourself before you turn twenty-five.”

“I’d be doing a much better job if it was intentional,” Ed said.  “Three-eighths day, and I’ll drop two shifts.  That’s the most you’re gonna get.”

Al sighed for so long Ed couldn’t help being impressed at his pulmonary capacity.

“In-N-Out?” he asked.

“Fuck, yeah,” Ed said.

Even better, it was obvious Al wasn’t really mad, because he bought Ed a milkshake.

  


* * *

  


Roy lifted Ed’s right hand and ran his fingertip lightly over the ridges of scarring on either side.

“I always…”  His voice came out hoarse and sort of wobbly, and he cleared his throat.  “I always—assumed these were related to the surgery on your shoulder.  I should have a—”

“I wouldn’t’ve told you,” Ed said, and he knew as he said it that it was the truth.  The truth sucked balls sometimes, which unfortunately did not affect the fact that it was true.  “I—never mentioned it to anybody before.  Winry doesn’t even know.  I just told people I fell.  Which I did, a couple times—that’s just not what did it.”

He swallowed.  Roy squeezed his hand gently and then stood up and crossed the kitchen to get him a glass of water, which was just… fucking… adorable.  Was what it was.

He gulped some down and took a breath.

“Sorry,” he said.

Roy smiled that same fucking heart-twisting life-ruiner of a smile and brushed a couple strands of hair back from Ed’s face.  “Don’t be.  Why are you sorry?”

“’Cause I’m not done yet,” Ed said.

The smile faltered a little bit.  “…ah.”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “So we got In-N-Out, and we parked in the lot to eat it, and Al pretty much just upended his hand sanitizer bottle on my hands, and… it was literally the best fucking thing I’ve eaten in my entire life, ever, period.”  More water.  He fucking needed it.  “Except—then my phone started to ring.  And ring.  And ring.  And Al got this look in his eyes like fucking steel, and he—I’d never heard him use that voice before, and I haven’t heard it since, but he just said ‘Give it here,’ and it wasn’t even a _choice_ ; I just handed it over.  And he just started going through it app by app and deleting Soph from everything—y’know, contacts, phone, recent calls, Facebook, _everything_ , and blocked his number and all that shit.  And then he gave it back to me, and he said ‘Don’t take any calls from any numbers you don’t recognize for a while,’ and I was just like ‘Okay’, and… then we went to go chill in the ER.”  He took another sip of water.  “For, like, three years.”

Roy wrinkled his nose, which was actually the cutest thing that had ever happened on the planet, barring a few Al-and-kitten interactions that had instantaneously cured diseases with their sheer fucking schmaltz.

Except… this was sort of the bad part.

“Long story short,” Ed said, “they put my thumb back, mummified my hand in gauze and shit, told me not to punch any more brick walls and blah-blah, and… by that time it was, like, godawful o’clock, so I was sort of secretly glad Al’d blackmailed me into agreeing to stay home the next day.  And while we were waiting, I’d been texting people to take my work shifts, so that was all right.”  He stared into the water glass.  “Right up until the next morning, when my hand somehow hurt _more_ , and also my fucking back was killing me from landing like a moron, and I was hobbling around our apartment like I was a billion years old, so I was lying down on the couch, and I’d just started checking Facebook and shit, and… he’d made a new account and sent me all these—messages.”

The depths of the water glass were spectacularly unrevealing, but it was better than looking at Roy.

It was fucking hard.  It was fucking _hard_ , and he was trying to figure out how to say it, and he hesitated long enough that Roy said softly: “Like what?”

“Just—” Ed ironed out the threat of a waver in his voice.  “Whatever he fucking… I dunno.  ‘Come back, or I’ll find you.  You’re mine, and you know it, and you can’t hide from me.’”  He rubbed his thumb at a tiny mark on the glass.  “‘How dare you use me like that and then run away like a coward.  Who told you to leave me?  You didn’t want to, did you?  You’re better than that.’  Just—shit.  All kinds of shit.  And Al came in with this heaping-ass plate of bacon—I remember because he literally dropped it when he saw my face, and then he grabbed my phone out of my hands and started reading all of it, and I was like ‘What about the grease?  Look at the carpet, what about our deposit?’, and he was like, ‘To _hell_ with our damn _deposit_ , Brother,’ and I almost passed out.”

Roy was staring at him again.  He could feel it.  That was about the thousandth reason he needed to getthrough this; there’d been other shit he needed to talk to Roy about, and the last goddamn thing he wanted was some pity for a stupid fuck-up two years past—even if it was rearing up into the present at the worst possible fucking time.

“Anyway,” he said, “Al was like, ‘I’m telling him never to talk to you again, and if he does, you _tell_ me, okay?’, and I just… I mean, I was on autopilot; he could’ve said anything, and I would’ve said ‘Yeah,’ and I would’ve meant it.  When I just—when I run out of me, I just default to whatever Al says, and… he’s always right anyway, so it works out okay.”

Roy’s stare had softened a little bit.  Ed could sense that sort of shit now—how weird was that?  If he wasn’t so goddamn busy with thesis crap, he would’ve tried to set up a study; what were the parameters of it, and was it consistent, and…?

“I guess he took a couple screenshots,” Ed said.  “Al’s fucking smart like that, but he sent them to himself and then deleted them off my phone, which—” One of the hard parts.  He’d get through; he always did.  “I mean, the whole goddamn fucking point of me, of being his brother, is that I’m—I’m supposed to be the one who deals with the bad shit, right?  I’m supposed to be the one who protects _him_ , not the other way around.”  His voice kept trying to stick, but he wouldn’t let it.  “Just—I fucked it up so… much.  I don’t know.  He never should’ve had to deal with all that crap just because I’m…” _A weak, self-centered, self-destructive piece of shit and a whore for validation._   “…me.”

“I think you’re wonderful,” Roy said softly.

“You’re delusional as shit,” Ed said, more towards the glass of water than anything else, but Roy would figure it out.  “Though I gotta say, it looks damn good on you.”  He drew another breath.  “But—yeah.  Anyway.  Al… called Dolch and was like, ‘Hi, this is Al, I’m Ed’s brother, can you do me a favor and call back here if that— _individual_ —he was with comes by the store, please?’, and then he turned to me all serious and shit and was like, ‘Does he know where your lab is?’  And I hadn’t ever said, or I didn’t _think_ I had—I mean, obviously he knew what fucking school, but it’s a big-ass fucking campus, so I was like, ‘Al, it’s fine.’  And Al goes, ‘But your lab website will come up in search engines, won’t it?  If he Googles your name, he’ll know exactly where to start looking.’  And he was right, ’cause—I mean, most of the time, people just don’t think about it, but so fucking much of our stupid lives just… becomes public property somehow, and it’s all out there, and you just sort of trust that the majority of people won’t take advantage of it and try to fuck you over, but then you get into a situation like this…”

“It’s true,” Roy said softly.

“Which is how I know you were valedictorian at your high school back in the Stone Age,” Ed said.  “They put the list going back until, like, 1940 on their site, and it comes up for your name, and then you can verify that against your LinkedIn, where you say where you went—I mean, it’s _batshit_ , when you think about it.”

He risked a glance.  Roy was smiling wryly.  “That’s… the primary reason I try not to.”

Ed scrubbed a hand down his face.  “Anyway, just… Al walked me to lab like I’d get lost or something, which was pretty funny except when he wouldn’t leave, and I fake-casually asked our lab manager if they could just—temporarily take me off the website, or whatever, which was probably hilarious, because I can’t act for shit, and… Al went off to do his stuff, but he told me not to leave without him, so I just hung around forever, so I was still in lab when Dolch called and was like, ‘Dude, that guy’s here; he’s asked where you are, like, eight times.’”

Roy winced.

“And right after I hung up,” Ed said, “Izumi came out of some super-intense application review meeting or something and walked in and was like ‘What the hell happened to your hand?  Did you burn yourself?  Was it here?  Damn it, Ed, HR is going to _flay_ me,’ only then she saw the look on my face and just—stopped—and was like, ‘Wait a second, what are you still doing here?  Don’t you usually work nights?  You look like you saw a ghost, Ed, what’s wrong?’”

Roy winced harder.  “Sometimes… I’ve found that sometimes getting sympathy makes it worse.”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  That was a nicer way to put it than _I almost burst into tears all over my PI and told her I was a miserable failure and I’d always be alone and I just sort of wanted to stop existing so I wouldn’t have to cause people I loved so much fucking trouble anymore_.  Presumably that was why Roy got paid to couch shit cleverly.  “Before I could freak out about it, though, Al came in and distracted Izumi talking about how great all my recent research was, so then we were talking about that, and I kinda calmed down, and then Al dragged me out and drove me home and made dinner and put me to bed and shit.”  He paused.  “Y’know… Winry is about the luckiest chick alive.”

“Certainly high on the list,” Roy said, starting to grin.  “I think she knows it, though.”

“She fucking better,” Ed said.

Roy waited—somehow without making it look like he was expectant or trying to rush Ed through it or anything.  The man was fucking talented.  How did people do shit like that?

“Right,” Ed said.  “Anyway… Next morning, he’d… made another Facebook, and I had all these messages again, only this time they were, like… _I miss you so much it’s killing me, I’m so sorry, whatever I did, I’m sorry, I’ll fix it, please just let me make it up to you, we can get through this, don’t give up on me, I adore you, perhaps I didn’t say it enough, you illuminate something in me that I never knew could catch the light, you make me better, I need you, this life feels so absolutely desolate without the beautiful prospect of you in my future, and I don’t know if I can bear it, please let’s just give it another try, and another chance, and this time I swear to you I’ll make it worth your while_.”

Roy’s eyes darkened, but he didn’t say anything—didn’t say _How many times did you_ read _that to remember it so well?_ , didn’t say _Are you really enough of a sucker that you believed him?_

He just took Ed’s right hand again and held it in both of his, very gently, and Ed could feel his heartbeat through his skin.

“So Al came in,” Ed said, leaving out the part where he’d ignored offers of bacon and coffee from the direction of the kitchen because he was too busy lying on the bedroom carpet having an existential crisis and listening to his cardiovascular system thoroughly test its own limits, “and was like, ‘Brother, I think maybe you should shut down your Facebook for a while,’ so I did, and he put a message on his saying people could contact him to get in touch with me, since almost everybody knows that anyway.  And then he was like, ‘Also, I was thinking you might want to quit your job at the store, because he could trap you there, and he knows your schedule,’ so I called the Reynolds and told them I was having some shit going on, and I was going to have to leave, and I was sorry and all that shit, and if they wanted I could take really early morning shifts and do a lot of the stocking to make up some of the staffing problem while they tried to fill my spot.  And they couldn’t exactly turn down help, and they couldn’t exactly _make_ me stay, either, so they were just sort of like, ‘Sure, whatever,’ so I started doing crack-of-dawn shit for them a couple days a week to try to keep the money coming in.  Which turned out to be real good practice for the coffee shop.  And I didn’t have to see him or anything, although I kept running into Dolch when he came in for his shift, and he’d always be like, ‘Yeah, he was here yesterday, and he asked for you’—every single fucking time.”

“God,” Roy said faintly.

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “And… yeah.  So… I mean, it was okay for a week or so.  Like, it was fucked-up, and I kept—I’d just be looking over my shoulder every second; I was so jumpy you could’ve restarted a fucking car battery from my shit, I dunno, but… it started to get a little better, because at least—y’know, I mean, at least he wasn’t in my face all the time, right?  Just… in my head.  But there’s all kinds of shit in my head, so he had to fight for elbow room anyway, and… yeah.”

Roy was doing the tactful waiting thing again, which was even more impressive given that he had to have heard the implication in Ed’s voice that the other shoe was hanging by a thread.

No point in trying to maintain the fucking suspense, though.  Ed wanted some fucking sleep tonight.

“So then,” he said, “a week and two days after the whole… handcuff… thing, we… got a letter.”

Roy’s eyebrows drew together.  The man was just so fucking cute.  Jesus.

“No return address, obviously,” Ed said, “but I knew it was his handwriting.  I mean, I just—I’d taken the whole stack of mail from our little cubby or whatever and brought it upstairs, and then I flipped our cell phone bill over, and then… _that_ , and I just…”

“Just what?” Roy asked softly.

“Panicked,” Ed said.  “You—know how.  Like that.  But—bad.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Roy said, and that should’ve been—something.  Should’ve been annoying or condescending or disparaging or _something_.  But it wasn’t.  Roy wasn’t.

“Well,” Ed said, “I honestly don’t remember that much of it, ’cause it was all just—blurry and weird and shit, so—yeah.  Al was at the other end of the place talking to Winry on the phone, so he didn’t… I mean, I knew he wouldn’t want me to, but I—read it—and—I mean, it was—”

Dead-on.  Accurate and merciless in absolutely equal measure.  _How dare you run from me after all that time, all that energy, all that affection—all that personal cost, everything I gave you; did you ever ask a single thing of me that I didn’t deliver in full?  You wanted to be tied up and held down and owned straight through and told again and again and again that you were beautiful that way; you begged for it like a whore, gagged for it, groveled—did I judge you then?  What did I ever offer you but more generosity?  You are sick inside, Edward; you are sick at the core and broken deeply, and it takes a very particular kind of person to accept that, let alone to appreciate it.  When did I ever turn you away?  When did I ever give the slightest indication of how disgusting most people would find your needs?  You are the single most ungrateful slut I have ever been foolish enough to get involved with.  Do you think anyone else will ever forgive that?  Do you honestly believe any other human being on this planet is going to want you?  How dare you cast that all aside—for what?  A whim?  You change your mind by the moment, you stupid boy.  You don’t know the first thing about people, about living, about others—about how to treat your benefactors; about how to be worthy of their care.  How dare you disrespect me when I have scraped the very bottom of my fortitude in order to accept all of your pathetic faults?_

His head was ringing—spinning, echoing, bright-white-empty and too small.  “It was—fucked up.  He was fucked up.  He said—I guess he thought name-calling was a good way to get me back.”

There was a gleam of something very, very dark shifting in Roy’s eyes and darting down the shadows of his face.  “Did Al keep that?  The letter.”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  He neglected to mention the part where Al had had to pry it out of his shaking hands and hold him while he cried like a fucking baby, or how magnificently humiliating it was to sit there with his head in his hands while his angelic younger sibling read a long-ass tirade about his fucked-up fetishes.  “And the one that came after that, before we got the post office to hold that shit.”

Roy paused in scheming long enough to cringe a little more.  “Oh, Lord.”

Ed put the water glass down so he could rub his eyes without having to let go of Roy’s hand.  “I mean, that was—fine.  They were pretty cool about it; they just… stopped delivering his shit.  So that was okay, and we were sort of—trying not to think about it too much, I guess.  I was—I watched my back everywhere I fucking went, and I was applying for other jobs and shit, but I got this one interview at a toy store and just… showed up looking wrecked and hungover and trashed to shit and nervous as hell, and they were like, ‘No, thank you.’  Even though it wasn’t that I was a coke addict or some shit; it was just that I wasn’t _sleeping_.”

That memory was pretty reliable for gathering a sigh out of the bottom of his lungs.  _And we just want to let you know that drug tests are mandatory for all employees, Mr. Elric.  …well, I mean, sure, yeah, you’d want t… wait, what?  Wait, do you think I’m_ high _?_   The hysterical laughter probably hadn’t helped his case, all things considered, but… water under the bridge.  Too late now.

“But it was okay,” he said.  Sort of not-really-true, but not exactly a lie either.  “Up until I got up on the Sunday two weeks after that Friday night at the hotel, and I went to go into the kitchen, and there was an envelope that’d been slipped underneath the door.”

Roy’s eyes narrowed and then widened.  Now he was getting it.

“It was one of those apartments with a lobby downstairs and shit,” Ed said.  “I forget if I mentioned—y’know, the kind where everybody has the key to get into the complex, and then only you have the key to your place, right?  So one way or another, he got into the building, figured out from the little call button shit where our apartment was, and came up to leave that.  Just so—” Ed’s throat was starting to stick—not in a crying way; just in a… well, he wasn’t sure, really.  It was weird.  Like he’d been chewing on gravel, and some of the shrapnel was buried in the walls of his esophagus, or some shit.  “Just so we’d—know he’d been there.  Just so we’d know that he knew exactly where to find us.”  No.  Not ‘us’.  Not really.  “Where to find _me_.”

Roy’s grip on his hand tightened until it almost hurt.  “You—what did you do?  Did you go to the police?  Di—”

“Al found me lying there losing my shit again a while later.”  If he glossed over it, and said it like it was no big deal, that made it less stupid, right?  Maybe.  Hopefully.  “And he picked it up—and read it, and then folded up the paper and put it back in the envelope real carefully and held it by one corner, I guess ’cause he wanted to preserve the fingerprints—he said, ‘Brother, we have two choices.’  But I was—I mean, I couldn’t—really do conversation yet, so he had to put it down again and then crouch down and talk me back into being a human being and shit for a while, and then he said it again, and this time I could do words okay, so I was like, ‘What?’  And he said, ‘We can file a restraining order, or we can pack up and move.  Those are our two options.  What do you want to do?’”

Roy was waiting again—waiting and looking at him, but not in a judgey way, and _fuck_ , Ed loved him so goddamn _much_.

“And—I mean—” The fact that it wasn’t judgey didn’t make the weight of Roy’s gaze easy to bear by any means.  Easi _er_ , maybe, but a far fucking cry from easy.  “I just—I was a fucking wreck by then, right?  I was—I was so wound up and torn apart and shit; I couldn’t… I mean, I’d sort of—Googled it, I’d been thinking about it, but the idea of trying to fill out the forms and probably having to take out a fucking loan to pay a lawyer—and then have to see his face in court—and getting it all fucking dredged up, and having to talk about everything he’d said and done and all the shit he’d called me and all the shit I’d _agreed_ to—in front of a bunch of strangers—”

“A good lawyer would have made it as painless for you as they could,” Roy said softly.

“Yeah,” Ed said, although he didn’t exactly figure it could have been even if he’d found a firm composed entirely of canonized saints.  “But I didn’t have any kind of lawyer.”

Roy smiled slightly, but there was a hard edge to it.  “You do now.”

“You just told me you can’t pay your office rent,” Ed said.  “And you know damn well I can’t afford you.”

“Legal counsel is complimentary for lovers,” Roy said.

“Smartass,” Ed said, and if his face was heating up a little bit, it was a fucking coincidence, _okay_.  “I’m not gonna take advantage of you like that.  I’ve had enough people ask me to diagnose their weird skin conditions and shit for free just because I’m getting a fucking doctorate.”

“I believe it,” Roy said.  “But—really, please.  Consider it.  I wouldn’t mind.  All I want—” Aw, shit, he was taking both of Ed’s hands again, and lifting them up, and kissing the knuckles, and Ed was going to die, and he didn’t even really care at this point.  “—is for you to be safe and happy.  Nothing in my power would be too much to ask.”

Ed squirmed a little, but he was careful not to dislodge his hands.  Because… just because.  “Well—I wouldn’t—feel right.  And it doesn’t matter.  It’s all over and done with and whatever.”

“But if he’s local,” Roy said quietly, “and he’s asking around the area, it… might… not be.”

It was less that Roy’d taken the words right out of his mouth and more that they’d been pried out of the darkest corners of the deepest vault in his terrified animal brain, but the end result was the same.

Roy must have seen the edges of it wearing through onto Ed’s face, because he winced again—hard this time—and leaned forward to kiss Ed’s forehead softly.

“Never mind,” he said, like that fucking phrase had ever erased a goddamn thing in the whole of human history.  “All of that can wait until after you’ve defended next week—and worrying about _that_ can wait until tomorrow.”

“I’m not worrying,” Ed said.  “I’ve never worried about anything in my entire life.”

Roy smiled, stood, and offered him both hands, even though it obviously wasn’t like he needed help standing up from a kitchen chair.

He took them anyway.

Roy wrapped him into a tight hug as soon as he was upright.

“I imagine you might be ready for some sleep by now,” Roy said.

“Yeah,” Ed mumbled into Roy’s collarbone.  It wasn’t even a voluntary thing; he’d forced out so many words tonight that it was like the remnants and the rejects and the leftovers were just sort of… spilling.  “I was… thinking… I wanted to ask you—later, I mean; tomorrow—if you have any tips on how to talk in front of people so my defense’ll be even more kickass.”

Roy kept a hold of his right hand all the way up the stairs, letting go long enough for them to brush their teeth—but for the entirety of that, he had his fingertips settled against the small of Ed’s back, right above the edge of his jeans, feather-light but undeniable.  Weirdly, it was—nice?  Maybe it should’ve felt possessive, after everything Ed had said; maybe it should’ve seemed like overcompensation, or like staking a claim to territory, and it should’ve been offensive, but…

Roy had a gift for that—for striking the right note, strumming the right chord, balancing all the fucked-up feelings on a narrow edge, but with so much confidencethat Ed never feared that they were going to fall.

And it was funny—how, apparently, having somebody you’d slept with stripping your clothes off could be sweet instead of sexual.  He’d been expecting… well, he’d been too fried by trying to get all those words out to expect much of anything, but if he’d thought about it, he would’ve expected Roy to want to touch him everywhere—kiss him, bite him, mark him.  He would have expected Roy to seduce him fast and hot and furiously, for some aggressive _thank you for confessing/now you’re mine_ sex to try to peel the stain of Soph Kimblee off his skin.

Except Roy didn’t.  He swept Ed’s hair back very gently, ghosted the pads of his thumbs over the deep-ass fucking circles underlining Ed’s eyes, smiled with a delicate sort of sadness in his own, and leaned in to kiss Ed’s forehead.

“Come on, sweetheart,” he said softly.

Ed could hear the other words—the usual ones, loud and fucking clear, three damn syllables to shake his life apart—but there were new ones, too, unvoiced, carved in kisses into the nape of his neck as Roy’s arms wrapped around him, and the blankets started to absorb the heat.

_I’ve got you,_ Roy was saying.  And if he had, if he’d spoken it, Ed would’ve answered, _You do, though—every last damn thing._


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OKAY, GUYS. This is the LAST CHAPTER before shit starts to get really real – if you're not a fan of horrible cliffhangery goodness, _stop reading after this one_. I mean it. I'm serious. FINAL WARNING. XD Wait until the third chapter of the next fic in this series comes out before you jump back in – which should, hopefully, only be a total of four weeks, if all goes to plan. It's for your own good, I swear! XD 
> 
> In the meantime, for this chapter, a couple things I want to reiterate, since in real time it's been a long while since Al said them:  
> You do not have to forgive people who have hurt you, no matter who they are. You can love someone and not forgive them; you can forgive someone and still not love them. Forgiving doesn't make you weak. Not being able to forgive doesn't make you petty. You do not have to be the "bigger person". You do not have to let it go. You are under no obligation to try to make it right. Your feelings are valid. Your pain is valid. Your healing process is valid, even if it doesn't look the same as someone else's. It is not selfish to take care of yourself. It is not selfish to remember. It is not selfish to walk away. Investment in you from another person is not a bank loan; you do not owe anything in return. You don't owe anyone absolution. You don't owe anyone an explanation. You matter. You are worthy. You are enough.
> 
>  
> 
>  **RECAP:** present-day!Ed is walking around with Hohenheim in Kensington Gardens and just asked why Hohenheim left them. Past-tense!Ed finally finished the story about Kimblee in all of its disastrous glory, and now gets to worry about his career instead.

It’s not every day that you ask your fucking father outright why he abandoned you—it’s not every day that the when and the how become clear; and it’s not every day that you put your whole fucking soul on the line for the question that’s wracked you from the beginning.

It’s not every day that you stare straight ahead at the too-clear blue sky and listen to your pulse beating while you wait for an answer that might be worse than the silence ever was.

Apparently today’s the day for Ed.

He swallows. He breathes.  That’s something, right?  A woman with a collie on a leash jogs up behind them, then around them, and then off down the path ahead.

If Hohenheim makes him repeat himself, there’s going to be a murder.  Ed’s touring plans didn’t include the inside of a jail cell, but he’s flexible, and having to say the words _“Why the hell did you leave?”_ twice in a minute to your own fucking parent would be grounds for homicide in any civilized country in the world, so maybe he’d get off with just a fine.  Or—

“Ah,” Hohenheim says quietly.  “Well… I’m afraid I digressed a bit, yes.  To make it somewhat briefer—I left the job.  I stayed on as an occasional consultant, but mostly I just… cashed in on what we’d already made, and invested, and that sort of thing.  I was good at playing the numbers—still am.  Always just a bit too lucky for my own good.”

There’s another thing Ed definitely didn’t inherit.  Hallefuckinglujah.

“And it was all so… idyllic,” Hohenheim says.  Up goes the hand; the glasses jitter around.  “It was peaceful, and domestic, and perfect in a way I’m not sure I know how to describe.”

Ed swallows, then swallows again, then voices the bubble of frigid, terrified rage:

“You got bored,” he says.

“Ah,” Hohenheim says, glancing over at him with a fragment of a smile.  “Not quite—not that simple.”

Fuck him.  _Fuck_ him for—

Everything.  Fuck him for all of it.  Fuck him for leaving her; fuck him for treating her like a queen before he did it; fuck him for making her so fucking _happy_ and then just disappearing into the goddamn motherfucking night and abandoning the best woman in the world with two squalling children that looked like him, talked like him, started to want stupidly advanced science textbooks that she couldn’t even fucking _afford_ —

There is no excuse in the fucking universe that can change the fact that Hohenheim abandoned the woman that he promised his life to.  He left her to die.

Ed gets a lot of shit he didn’t when he was seven, eight, nine.

He gets love now.

And that makes it worse.

“I was offered,” Hohenheim says, “an extremely covert military contract for developing a device to detect subterranean landmines in war-torn nations, so that we could extract them before they detonated.”

Ed—

—breathes.

Still just London air with a touch of pollen and a hint of rain; still just trees and grass and a trail of pavement winding off into the distance.

“There were conditions,” Hohenheim says.  “A list so long I’d barely even read it all when I agreed.  But—ah.  It’s… perhaps you’ll understand.”

He adjusts his glasses.

Ed curls his fists in his pockets until his fingernails dig deep into his palms, just so that he can feel something other than the heat radiating through every fucking vein in his body.

“I had a chance,” Hohenheim says, “to make a difference.  An enormous one.  To change the world; to save lives; to _matter_ , in my small way.  All I had to do was give up everything I loved for a while.”

That’s the thing, about people.

Most people aren’t trying to fuck you over.

Sure, some of them are out for blood and schadenfreude, and they _know_ they’re pure shit and malice at the core.  They know they’re going to walk on everybody they can throw beneath them on their way towards their own personal definitions of gain and glory.

But most people aren’t.

Most people aren’t trying to hurt anybody.

Most people are just trying to get by.  Most people are just doing the best they fucking can.

But people are stupid.

They don’t know how to fix shit once they’ve fucked it up.

And they don’t know how to apologize.

The thing is, Ed does understand.  And in an abstract kind of way, what Hohenheim’s saying is really logical.

Of course you should prioritize the weight of the whole world and the good you could do for it.  From a purely rational perspective, juxtaposed that with the little happiness you’ve gathered up in your particular corner, the world wins, every time.  It’s just fucking math.  It’s obvious.

But the world is never going to love you back.

The world is never going to give a shit.

And life’s too short for that.

Life’s too short to spend alone.  Life’s too short to slog through unappreciated.  Life’s too short to measure with a catalogue of accomplishments.  Ed knows a thing or two about too fucking short, and he sure as hell knows this.

Life’s about the people you matter to.

It’s great to matter to strangers—to make an impact; to brush against someone else’s life and leave it subtly or not-so-subtly altered; to affect the world that’s shaped you and leave it changed.

But it’s more important to matter to yourself.

It’s more important to understand who the fuck you are and what you’re looking for; it’s more important to recognize the significance of that.  It’s more important to assign a meaning to your own goddamn existence and do right by _you_ than it ever could be to live up to expectations levied by somebody else.  At the end of the day, you’re all you’ve got.  You’re the only one who can decide that your own happiness is worth fighting for.

That’s one of the things Hohenheim forced Ed to learn by leaving.

And it looks like he never picked it up himself.

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “I know what you mean.”

Hohenheim’s smile looks—what?  Faintly relieved?  Does he actually give a shit about Ed’s judgment after all?

Wishful thinking, probably.  Wishful, vengeful thinking that’s not going to get either of them anywhere.

“It was once-in-a-lifetime,” Hohenheim says.  “Although, I suppose, if you consider it as a case of universal coincidences, any experience is.”

Ed makes his mouth smile back instead of saying _Yeah, like sticking with your wife and raising your kids._

“Isn’t that all it is, in the end?” Hohenheim asks.  “Life, I mean.  It’s a series of universal coincidences.”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “I guess so.”

It’s funny, too.  Some part of him—some deeply-ingrained little instinct he could never shake—always felt that parents were supposed to be _right_ about things.  That was the point of parents, after all—they knew how shit worked, and they explained it to you as you went along, to help craft you into a functioning human.  He’s always sort of secretly feared that that was where he’d gone so wrong—except then he reminds himself that Al is perfect and also well-adjusted, so a lack of parental guidance can’t be the reason Ed turned out so fucked.

The problem is, parents are just fucking people, too.  Sometimes they mean well; and sometimes they don’t; and sometimes they do, but they act stupid.

Hohenheim’s the reason Ed knows how to fight like a fucking demon to survive.  And here he is, voicing his personal philosophy that life’s something that happens to you—not something that you construct one goddamn fucking struggle at a time.

And yeah, everybody’s probability’s bitch, in the end.  Everybody’s subject to the eddies and the whirlpools made by the intersecting currents of the other lives around them.

But like fucking hell has Ed ever waited for the universe to deal him a nicer hand.  Like hell has he ever rolled over and taken it.

Hohenheim fucked his whole life up because he’d never really been helpless—that’s what it was, isn’t it?  He fucked it up because he’d always had enough; because he’d always been comfortable; because he didn’t, he _couldn’t_ , understand the magnitude of what he had to lose.  Because he didn’t expect the universe to steal it from him in the first place.

Life is a series of _obstacles_ —a number of which, like elements of a video game course, are actively trying to destroy you.  Life is a series of fires to put out; of piles of undifferentiated nonsense that you have to sort through for meaning.  Life is a shitshow, and it’s your choice whether you’re sitting in the gallery, or you’re on stage.

Ed’s not under any illusions that he’s better than anyone—it’s not like the rivers of crap he’s waded through have made him somehow inherently more valuable or something; that’s bullshit.  He’s just a bewildered little wisp of a soul stuck in another jacked-up body, wandering around trying to find a reason to keep on wandering.

But he’s an actor, and Hohenheim’s an observer.

Ed is never, ever going to betray somebody he made promises to just because it’s easier than figuring out what’s missing in himself.  ‘Easier’ is bullshit.  He and Al have never had it easy, but that doesn’t mean they fucking quit.  When the going got tough, they worked their asses off to keep their heads above the water and turn their luck around.  They always looked out for each other.  They always made the best they could of what they got.

Fuck the Nobel.   _That’s_ the thing about them that Mom would be proud of.

“The whole thing took several years,” Hohenheim says.  “Much longer than they assured me at the beginning, but I suppose that’s what I should have expected from the government.”

The bastard gazes out at the trees, slipping his hands into his pockets.

“By the time I was off the contract and could communicate freely again,” he says, “I’d lost track of you.  Oxford was clamoring for my expertise—very nearly begging; they verbally offered me tenure before I’d even been appointed.”

Ed makes the mistake of glancing down and sees their shadows on the pavement—at which point he almost jumps out of his fucking skin.  They look—

Not exactly _alike_ , but… too-similar.  In addition to the obviously-not-all-that-substantial height difference, there are some pretty distinct variations in shape and shit, but they hold their shoulders the exact same fucking way—half-hunched, almost like they’re protecting something.  Almost like they’re ashamed.

“It was so hard to say no,” Hohenheim says, “when I wasn’t even sure I had a home to go back to.”

Ed looks up at him.  He’s fussing with his damn glasses again.

It seems antifuckingclimactic, after all this time.

Hohenheim destroyed Ed’s and Al’s childhoods out of a couple of interconnected acts of ordinary fucking selfishness.

That’s all it ever was.

“Goodness,” Hohenheim says, gesturing towards the place the trees part, which marks the opening to the street with a wide wrought-iron gate.  “We’re nearly through.  Would you like to go to the Victoria and Albert?  Or perhaps we should stop for a bit of brunch—what do you think?”

“I think I’m starving,” Ed says.  “You got someplace in mind?”

  


* * *

  


Friday, June fifth dawned with some weird, muggy heat that made Ed’s shoulder ache.  He watched it—the dawn, not the heat; it wasn’t radiating off the pavement just yet—from Roy’s front window with a mug of coffee in his hands.  He hadn’t quite dared to finish the coffee, because he was queasy as fuck from the lack of sleep, and pouring acid on top of that didn’t sound like the _best_ idea on Earth right before jacking his system all to hell on adrenaline, so…

So he sat.

It was probably the worst possible time to let himself dwell on it right now, but fuck that shit anyway; “the worst possible” was usually his baseline for just about anything, and so far he’d come out okay.

It was just that he had no fucking clue what he was going to do after today.

School, in its admittedly myriad forms, was the only thing he’d ever done.  Sure, the grad thing was basically a job, and obviously he’d been doing the part-time side-drudgery gig since well before he had the work permit in hand, but he’d never faced an open-ended future and stared into the void.  This was some Nietzschean abyss shit.  He had no freaking idea how deep it went, how far the tunnels ran, where the roads led to—what was waiting at the end, what the mile markers looked like—and no idea what he should be looking for.

He’d never really had a choicebefore.

All he knew how to do was survive.  This _life_ thing—what the fuck was that?  What the fuck was he supposed to do with the whole world sprawled out ahead and no more pushes from behind?

The faint shuffling noises upstairs gave Roy away long before the creaky stair made its discontentment known.  Apparently deaf to the stair’s protests, Roy padded up behind the couch and leaned over the back, wrapping his arms around Ed’s shoulders, and pressed his cheek against Ed’s temple.

“Good morning, beautiful,” he said.  “Did you get any sleep at all?”

“Maybe,” Ed said, which was… slightly generous.  “It’s okay.  Just gotta get through it.”

Roy kissed his ear.  “Can I top off your coffee?”

“Probably better not,” Ed said, leaning into the touch.  “I might vibrate right out of the visible plane.  I’ll be okay; the adrenaline’s gonna be… really somethin’.”

“I imagine so,” Roy said softly.  He kissed Ed’s cheek and drew back.  “I guess I should unveil my secret weapon, then.”

Ed had to tilt his head back to blink up at him.

Roy grinned broadly—all mussed-up bedhead and five-o-clock shadow and absolute fucking _gorgeousness_.

“Can I make you some bacon?” he asked.

If Ed had had the brainpower to do anything more than nod emphatically, he might’ve proposed right there, so it was probably a good thing the words wouldn’t come.

  


* * *

  


It turned out to be both a good and a bad thing that Ed had fortified himself with breakfast—good, because he needed the calories to sustain his skyrocketing heart-rate; bad, because he was pretty sure he was going to throw up.

The meeting scheduled before him in the big-ass auditorium ran late, so he didn’t get in until after they’d eaten up half of his prep time.  The projector wouldn’t work.  His laser pointer was flickering in and out of life.  The video on the last research slide worked, like, fifty percent of the time, completely inexplicably, in a way that the IT chick he’d asked the other day couldn’t even fathom.

At this point, it’d be just as good to call it quits, fail to defend, drop out, never get employment, and die penniless in the gutter, right?

“Brother,” Al said, grabbing his left shoulder firmly and guiding him over to the chair right in front of the podium in the auditorium where his life was about to end, “sit.”

Ed sat.

Winry, who rocked a sundress like nobody Ed had ever met in his life—and had, on the short walk from the parking lot, turned about sixteen heads so fast that their owners had almost decapitated themselves—started banging away at his stubborn-ass computer, and Al plopped down next to him and leaned his head on Ed’s un-fucked-up shoulder.

“You’re going to be fine,” Al said, very quietly, and he put his hand over Ed’s where it was clenched in the leg of his slacks so hard his knuckles ached.  “The hardest part was getting here.  If you just flip through the slides and show them the draft of your paper, you’ll pass.  I promise.”

“Maybe,” Ed got out.

“Roy’s coming, right?” Al asked.

“Yeah,” Ed said.  Distraction helped.  Al knew it, and Ed knew he knew it, but it helped anyway.  “He got a case just the other day, and they really need it right now, so he can’t really afford to take the whole day off anymore, but he said he’d make it.”

“Then he’ll be here,” Al said—like it was just that simple.  He had to have been straining his neck a little, slouching like that.  Not that Ed was—y’know—or anything; just that… Al was… really tall.  _Freakishly_ tall.  And maybe the seats in this auditorium were uneven or something.  Maybe there’d been a very localized earthquake recently, and the floor under Ed’s chair had sunk.  “Where would you like to go for dinner tonight?”

“Don’t care,” Ed said.  “Just want steak.  And vodka.  Maybe not at the same time.”

“I’m glad that the stress hasn’t had a negative impact on your unshakable dignity and characteristic tact,” Al said.

Ed had no idea how people could assemble sentences like that even when they _weren’t_ wrecked as shit and sleep-deprived and generally weary of the world, so he settled with just sort of growling in response.

Al laughed.

The little shit.

“You’re going to be okay,” Al said again.  “You don’t even really have to say anything.  Your slides are bulletproof.”

Ed scowled at his ornery fucking laptop, which Winry was talking to in a very soothing sort of voice now.  “That’s not gonna help if my committee never fucking sees ’em.”

Al wrapped an arm around his shoulders and knocked their heads together gently at the temple.  “Breathe, Ed.”

“I’m fuckin’ trying,” Ed said, and he was, he _was_.  It was just— “What the hell am I supposed to do after this?”

“Rest,” Al said.  “Take some time off.  Do lots of nice things with Roy that I really, really don’t want to know about.  Read a book.  See the sun.  Remember that you’re a human being and not just a production machine that specializes in coffee and biomedical treatises.”

“Well, that’s, like, a week, right?” Ed asked.  “ _Then_ what?”

“After six years of frenzied labor,” Al said, “I think you’re entitled to more than a week of relaxing, but—Brother, don’t worry about what’s after that.  Life happens while you’re not paying attention, in between the things you planned—you know that.  Besides, after this?  After that paper goes to print?  Everybody who’s anybody in the bioscience community right now is going to be begging you to work for them.  They’re going to fling cash in your face.”

“You make me sound like a stripper,” Ed said.

Naturally, that was the part where Winry looked up.  “Wait, what?”

“Never mind,” Al said swiftly.  He kissed the side of Ed’s forehead and slung his ridiculously long body upright again.  “Can I help, Win?”

“Hell if I know,” she said.  “Can you do exorcisms?”

“ _In nomine_ _Patris_ _et Filii et Spiritus Sancti_ ,” Al said, perfectly straight-faced.  He paused.  “That’s… all I know.”  He reached over and tapped a key.  “ _Behave_ , wrathful demon possessing Brother’s laptop.  This is important.”

The screen shuddered into a rainbow of colors and then lit up with Ed’s cover slide.

All three of them were entirely still for a long moment.

“That is fucked _up_ ,” Ed managed.

“Whoa,” Al said.

“Damn, you’re good, Al,” Winry said.

Al grinned over at Ed.  “Sometimes you just have to believe in miracles.”

“I do,” Ed said.  “You got born, after all.”

Al looked like he was going to cry, and Winry looked like she was as close to vomiting as Ed had felt for the past five hours.

This was going to be an interesting day.

  


* * *

  


Ed’s heart was running like a prize-horse, battering at his ribs like some fucking Three Little Pigs shit, and the human body was a fragile house, when you really thought about it.

Roy appeared like a fucking vision exactly five minutes before Ed was due to start, by which time he was loitering around the podium turning his laser pointer over and over and over in his hands while he tried not to panic.  Al, who’d been loitering next to him, gave an audible sigh of relief when Roy’s sharp suit and general incomparable suavity materialized in the doorway and then sauntered down the aisle towards them.

“Hey,” Ed said, and the flood of relief and adoration almost took him out at the knees.  Roy’s smile didn’t fade, and his stride didn’t slow, and he wrapped Ed into a tight hug too fast for any protests.  Ed nudged his head under Roy’s chin.  “You’re so damn busy,” he said.  “You didn’t have to come.”

“I wouldn’t have missed this for the whole of the world,” Roy said softly.

Drawing back, Ed caught a glimpse of Al, who looked unspeakably smug.

“You should get ready,” Winry said.  She chafed her hands up and down her arms, frowning at the air vent that was keeping Ed from combusting on the spot from the immense activity in his nerves.

“Are you cold?” Ed asked.

Roy and Al stepped towards her at the same moment and—in perfect unison—asked, “Would you like my jacket?”

Winry stared at them.  They stared at each other.  Ed tried to stare at everybody at once, which was hard when there were three of them, and he only had binocular vision to work with.

“Holy crap, Ed,” Winry said.  “Are you secretly dating your brother?”

“ _No_ ,” Ed said.  “ _Gross_.  No offense, Al.”

“None taken,” Al said mildly.

Roy touched Ed’s elbow.  “I’ll disabuse her later.  Are you all set to get started?”

 _I am now that you’re here_ would’ve been too damn cheesy even for them.  Ed hoped the least-crazed smile he could force onto his face would do.

Roy smiled back, all fucking gentleness like always, and Ed’s heart didn’t stop ricocheting around his chest like a fucking ping-pong ball on speed, or anything, but it did kind of—soften—a little bit.

“Whatever happens,” Roy said, “no one here will love you any less.”

Ed couldn’t afford to get all dumb and emotional right now.  He pushed at Roy’s chest without much of any vigor.  “Go sit your sappy ass down, would you?”

Roy would know what he meant.  Roy usually did.  That was why this was working, and why this was wonderful, and why it was rocking Ed’s whole stupid little universe in the best possible way.

“Yes, sir,” Roy said, grinning, and Winry rolled her eyes, and Al touched his closed fist to Ed’s shoulder and then settled into his seat.  Ed felt sorry for whoever got stuck sitting behind that kid.  Tall-ass freak of nature.

Ed looked up at the screen, and then down at his three favorite people, and then at Pinako, sitting near the back “so your committee won’t mark you down if I fall asleep”, and then at Izumi about in the middle, and then at the panel of faculty judges that was going to decide his fate.

Well—no.  No, they weren’t.  _He_ was.  He was the force that was acting here.  All they could do was take what he was giving and describe what they saw.  _He_ was deciding what the verdict was.  This was all him—it had been since the start; this was _his_ life.  The waves and the weather weren’t under his control, but he was steering this motherfucking ship.  Nobody could take that away.

He closed his eyes.  Nobody could take that away, but they were _damn_ welcome to try—and to find out what he was made of.

He opened his eyes again.  He drew a breath.  He cleared his throat.

“Um,” he said.  He leaned in closer to the mic.  He honestly couldn’t tell if the sound he was hearing was feedback, or if his ears were ringing.  “…hi?”

He glanced at Al, at Win, and then at Roy—who was smiling at him like he’d hung the fucking stars up one by one, even though he was already failing to execute all of the advice Roy had given him on public speaking less than a week ago.

He cleared the rubble from his throat as well as he could with his heart still stuck in it, plastered on a smile, and squared his shoulders.

His whole lab was here, and a bunch of faculty members and miscellaneous lab rats had straggled in from his department and several others—some people he’d met at poster sessions and happy hours and whatever else; and plenty he’d never even seen before.

He had a brisk wind at his back and a hell of a lot of help on board.  Even if he couldn’t find his course, he was a long way yet from sinking.

“Hi,” he said, louder.  “I’m Edward Elric.  And I’m about to tell you why you should give me a doctorate.”

  


* * *

  


The next two and a half hours were a feverish blur of shit he’d practiced so many times that it felt like a mix of déjà vu and heroin, chased with such a brutal cocktail of adrenaline and exhilaration that the next thing he knew for sure, Al was holding tightly to his elbow while he walked up the stairs into the sun.

There was a hole towards the end of it—a part where he had been all alone in the giant auditorium in front of the committee members, and they were firing off questions to try to trip him, but he knew the answers to everything they asked.  The giddy, flitting terror of it subsided as he stumbled along; all he had to do was string the words together in an order that mostly made sense, because all of the facts were _there_.

Plus he knew Al and Roy were both hovering right outside the door, waiting for him, and he just had to get through this part so that he could go meet them.

And when he had—

The gentle pressure of Al’s hands on his arm solidified him as a human being again, guiding and nudging as he tried to remember how walking was supposed to work; but even when his ankles tangled on the second landing of the staircase, Al had a strong enough grip to keep him upright, and then they were topping the stairs, and then…

That was it.

Fuck knew how long his committee was going to deliberate.  Apparently the traditional thing was to give them a couple hours, so he’d gone ahead and booked, like, three.  If they were considering throwing him out without a degree, he wanted to make sure they had enough temporal leeway to rethink it a couple times.

“Brother,” Al was saying.  “Look at me.”

Ed did.  Ed blinked.  Some of the fog dissipated a little.  His knees were wobbly as shit, and his head still felt like it hadn’t gotten stuck on quite right, and a strong breeze would knock it off his shoulders, but mostly the shapes of the world around him were clear and comprehensible.  They’d climbed the staircase up out of the auditorium; and now they just had to wait; and _shit_ , was he thirsty; and Roy was beaming at him like he’d turned a sewer’s worth of water into an extremely upscale vintage.

“Jesus,” Ed said.  “Okay.  Uh.”

“Here,” Winry said, grabbing his hand, opening up his fingers, putting something cold into his palm, and closing his fingers around it for him.  “It’s from the café.  I’m not sure about this whole radioactive color scheme thing, but supposedly it’s their healthiest smoothie-whatever.”

“These are so fucking expensive,” Ed said stupidly.  “You didn’t have to do that.”

Winry grinned.  “So what?  It’s not every day you get your damn doctorate, dummy.”

“I don’t have it yet,” Ed said.  Either the cap on this thing was stupid-complicated, or his hands were beyond fucked.  Maybe both.

“Oh, my _God_ , Ed,” Winry said.  “Did you hear yourself?  I’m hazy on the details of the whole sequencing thing, and even I thought you were amazing.”

Ed stared at her, sort of frozen with his hand curled around the plastic cap of the bottle.  Winry didn’t exactly dole out honest compliments a lot.

“Can I have that in writing?” he asked.  “Or… no wait, hang on, say it again; just—somebody get their phone—”

Winry rolled her eyes, and Al laughed, and a very warm, very familiar, very beautiful arm wrapped around Ed’s shoulders.

“She’s right, though,” Roy said.  “You were even more extraordinary than usual.”

Ed tried to eye him suspiciously instead of just melting into a puddle of adoring goo.  Adoring goo didn’t usually get to walk at graduation and shit, and he knew Granny would want a picture of that.  “How do you know?  How much of it did you understand?”

Roy grinned, shamelessly delighted.  “I thought the first slide was absolutely stunning.”

Ed stared at him.  “You mean the title page with my name on it?”

“Poetic, even,” Roy said, hugging him closer.  “Positively inspiring.”  When Ed wriggled against his grip and made a point of scowling, he just grinned wider.  “I didn’t need to follow the finer details, Ed; I could hear everyone who did gasping and starting to take notes.”

Val and Derek and most of the rest of his lab wandered over, and Roy let go and stepped back so that everyone could pat his shoulders and shake his hand and otherwise transfer all kinds of bacteria to his vulnerable immune system, albeit in a polite sort of way.

“That was really something,” Val said, clinging onto his left hand, which couldn’t have been pleasant, because he’d been holding his juice thing in it a second ago, so probably it was clammy.  Her eyes were sort of shining, which was odd and possibly unhealthy.  “You’re really something, Ed.”  Her shining eyes then fixed on something just past Ed’s shoulder, widened, and shone a little more.  “Oh.  _Oh_.  Who’s _that_?”

Ed finally managed to extract his hand from hers in a not-completely-awkward way as he turned.

Roy was extending his hand in a not-awkward-at-all way, backlit by the bright sun, with a fucking dazzlingly gorgeous grin.

“Roy Mustang,” he said.  “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Val looked like she was going to pass out.  “I—I—you, too, I’m—Valerie Tussinger, it’s—” She paused, mouth slightly open.  “Wait—Roy?  You’re Roy?”

Ed was dying of thirst but didn’t quite dare to fill his mouth with liquid when this conversation was probably on the verge of a nuclear explosion, and he might have to intervene.  Then again, knowing him, it was more likely that if he spoke up, he’d somehow find a way to make it worse.  Make it go Chernobyl.  Pretty much decimate the entire surrounding area.  Whatever.

“I thought you were another student,” Val said, sounding slightly faint.  “I mean—he talks about you— _all the time_ , just—”

“I do not,” Ed said.

Everybody from his lab fucking busted up laughing, because they were a bunch of fucking traitors who were dead to him from now until eternity.

“I just figured you were someone from around here,” Val was saying, because Val was especially dead and also had no soul, “rather than…” Her eyes flicked up and down. “…a total _stud_.”

Roy smiled warmly.  “Is there a shortage of total studs around here?”  He gestured to Ed.  “Perhaps I found the only one.”

Silence.  A four-alarm fire on Ed’s face.  More silence.  Roy was grinning, the sick fuck.

“Oh, my God,” Winry said.  “You’re even worse than Al.”

“I beg your pardon?” Al said with a hint of a squeak in his voice.

“I mean good-worse,” Winry said.  “You _know_.”

“Wait,” Val said.  She stared at Ed, then at Roy, then at Ed.  “Roy’s your _boyfriend_?”

Roy paused, and there was a flicker of consternation in his expression now—which made Ed’s heart drop to his fucking shoes way faster than gravitational acceleration should have allowed.  Roy hadn’t said that to embarrass him—or not primarily.  Roy had said that because he’d assumed that Ed had told his lab that he was gayer than a rainbow and dating a smoking hot lawyer ten years his senior.  Roy had said that because he’d figured that their relationship was important enough to warrant coming out for.  Roy had said that because he’d thought that Ed had had the balls to say it months ago.

Ed sure fucking hoped he got a PhD today, because he might be losing the second most significant thing he’d started in the past six years.

“I just thought—” Val’s face was bright pink, too, now; she started to fan herself with her hand, and Winry offered her a folded up piece of paper that said _GO GET EM NERDFACE_ , which she’d been waving at Ed all day.  “Oh, thanks—I just thought—I always just figured he was… your _best_ friend, not your… I mean, you just talk about how _great_ he is, not how cute.”

Ed’s heartbeat in his ears was getting deafening, so he focused on watching Roy’s face to try to get a read on just how bad he’d fucked himself over this time.

Except—

Roy was—

Smiling at him.

“You talk about me like I’m your best friend?” he asked.

“Well,” Ed croaked out.  “…I guess… so.”

Roy slipped an arm around Ed’s waist and kissed his forehead—which was a terrible idea; the man was going to burn his lips off touching Ed’s flaming face with them, and that would be a tragedy worthy of a Grecian epic, because he had the best mouth on _Earth_ —and then released him.  He stayed close, but not too close, and maybe—

Maybe he _got_ it.  Maybe he understood that it wasn’t that Ed loved him any less; it wasn’t that Ed didn’t _want_ to sing it out from the rooftops of every major city in the world—

Just then a professor that Ed recognized from a couple of department functions and symposiums and shit who was kind of a big shot in genetics emerged at the top of the staircase and sauntered over to their little cluster.  He held out his hand, and Ed took it.

“Hey, Dr. Zaman.”  He almost sounded like a normal person having a real conversation; how the hell had he managed that?  “How are you doing?”

“Extremely well,” Zaman said, pumping Ed’s hand twice and patting it once before letting go.  “I do believe I just solved our hiring problem, what with Avi Polashek getting poached by MIT.”

“That’s great,” Ed said, because that was what you were supposed to say.  “I’m glad to hear that.”

This silence was even weightier than the last one, which was sort of bizarre.

“Ed,” Valerie said in a hushed voice, “you’re a moron.”

“I _like_ you,” Winry said.

“Oh, gosh,” Al muttered.

Zaman—laughed.  What the—?

“Maybe I should make this plainer,” he said.  “Edward, how would you feel about an assistant professorship in the department of genetics?  I don’t have the paperwork yet, of course, but—” He held his hands out.  “We have quite a few witnesses to the verbal offer, no?”

There was a weird rushing sound in Ed’s ears.  Maybe it was his blood.  Maybe it was the music of the spheres or some shit.

“Are you offering me a job?” he asked.  “I don’t even have…”

“You will,” Zaman said.  “If one of your committee members drops dead, and they reject you on a technicality, I’ll grant it myself.”  He paused.  “I think I can do that.  Hopefully we won’t have to find out.”

Ed opened his mouth, tried to speak, failed, and shut it again.

Zaman laughed again and clapped him on the shoulder—the right shoulder, so at least the jolt of pain sort of woke him up, and the ongoing radiating waves of it helped keep him that way.

“Izumi told me a little about what you’re publishing on,” he said.  “Don’t worry!  Just a taste-test—just enough to make me hungry enough to clear my schedule today so I could be here.  And forgive the tortured metaphor, but… damn, if you didn’t whet my appetite just now.  You’re going to do things so great we can’t afford to let anybody else get their hands on you.”

Ed could _feel_ Roy resisting the dirty joke.

“You don’t have to give me an answer yet,” Zaman said.  “You didn’t hear it from me, but you should shop around—somebody else might offer you more.  If they do, though…” He winked.  “Let me know, and it might not be the best offer for long.”

Ed had to clear his throat twice before he could produce enough sound for: “Th-thank you.  Thank you, Dr. Z—”

“Call me Amir,” Zaman said.  “With any luck, pretty soon, we’ll be coworkers.”

Ed was sort of struck dumb after that; his mind spun and spun and spun without catching while he watched Zaman walk away, contented as you fucking please, after hurling admittedly about the best kind of depth charge possible into the existing maelstrom of Ed’s emotions.

“Oh, Brother,” Al said after several moments.  “I told you it’d work out.  You look like a deer in the headlights; are you o…?  _Ed_ , oh, my gosh—”

And then Al was hugging him, which was fantastic, and he closed his eyes and buried his face in his perfect brother’s perfect shoulder, because his own arms seemed too heavy to lift—and then Roy was hugging him, too; and then Winry finagled her way into just about the only open spot left—

“Okay,” he wheezed out.  “I get the point—”

“About damn time,” Winry said.  “I swear, you’re the single most self-deprecating genius I’ve ever met in my life.  And I’ve met a few.”

That was about the part where Val started asking Winry about where she’d gone to school, and then the geeky girl talk started, and then there was some slightly high-pitched excitement about the intersection of biorobotics and stem cells and shit, and by that point the sleep deprivation had snuck up behind Ed and essentially chloroformed his ass, so he was just sort of standing there reading the label on his juice bottle and trying to figure out how you were supposed to unfurl complex thoughts so that you could understand them.  Right now all of his were just sort of rolled up in his head, like… sleeping bags.  Or bales of hay.  Or potato bugs.  Or—

“Let me get you something to eat, sweetheart,” Roy said, and then after a brief blur of Al chattering and patting his arm, there was ice cream in his hands and a totally unnecessary apology about how the café had stopped serving lunch, so there wasn’t anything with protein… which Ed cut off by grabbing Roy’s tie in one hand and dragging him down to kiss him hard.

“Oh,” Val said.  “Yeah.  Um.  Boyfriend it is.”

Roy was grinning down at him as he drew back, and two fingertips rose to brush his cheek.

Except then—before Roy could produce any more gorgeous mushiness—Ed’s thesis committee came parading up the stairs, and his heart staggered, stopped dead, plummeted, and pile-drivered his defenseless liver.

No matter what happened, he was going to have to apologize to his liver with some fucking booze.

Oh, God, oh, God, oh, holy fucking shit—

But—

Izumi was—

 _Beaming_ —

She wouldn’t fake him out; she liked him too much; she—

“Congratulations,” she said, reaching out for his hand, “Dr. Elric.”

Unsurprisingly—although his memory of the moment would lag like a glitchy animation forever, all stops and starts and jagged movements that didn’t really seem to transition, but they’d _happened_ somehow—the handshake morphed into a hug, and it was only when Izumi was patting his back gently that he realized he was clinging to her and mumbling “Thank you” and asking why she’d believed in him over and over, and that was probably…

Hell.  At least it wasn’t the first time she’d seen him coming unhinged from a lack of sleep, and if he somehow ended up employed here—if Zaman wasn’t shitting him, if it was _really_ —

Well, maybe it wouldn’t be the last.

His recollection of the rest of it skipped over a lot of the interim shit—somehow he and Roy and Al and Win ended up at a nice steakhouse, and even though it was a Friday night, Roy had somehow commandeered them a little booth off in a dark corner where Ed could be fucked-up-weird and embarrassing without anybody taking too much note, and Winry kept insisting that she was paying for his drinks, so he should try to bankrupt her while he had the chance, and—

Roy carded his fingers through Ed’s hair at some point between the first half of a cocktail with a bizarre name and the arrival of an appetizer that smelled like pure fucking caloric temptation.  “You… look like you’re in shock, sweetheart.”

“I’ll be fine,” Ed said.  “I hit that—you know that—the, like, wall—in your brain—when you’re just _driving_ , and you don’t even think, and you don’t have time to care, and then—”

“Existential crash test dummy,” Winry said, miming a car smashing to pieces, or… something.  Hopefully the car; otherwise Ed didn’t think he wanted to know.  “Hey, that fits, since you’re a dummy.”

“Dummies don’t get doctorates,” Al said, and he was grinning fit to break his face, and he looked so _proud_ —

“You know that’s not true,” Ed said.  “I’ve seen a couple.”

“You’re not one of them,” Al said.  “Ed, you’re—you’re so brilliant, and you worked so hard, and the future’s just getting brighter all the time, and—I’m just so _lucky_ you’re my brother, and I’m so _happy_ , and—”

They were both gonna cry.  What a fucking drag.

“Oh, jeez,” Winry said.  “I was waiting for this part.”

Roy’s hands were fluttering around Ed’s shoulders in a concerned sort of way while he blinked the tears back just so that Winry wouldn’t get to rub this in his face later on.

“Are you all right?” Roy asked.  “Edward—”

“So much f-fucking better than all right,” he managed.  “That’s—that’s the h-hard part.”  His laugh came out wet, but not as weak as it could’ve been.  “I dunno how to deal with feeling this fucking good.”

“There’s also the fact that I think your blood is sixty percent caffeine right now after the week you’ve had,” Al said.

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “Maybe sixty-five.”

Roy kissed his temple.  “You can sleep a lot easier tonight.”

“Are you going to quit the coffee shop?” Winry asked.  Her eyes gleamed in a way he wasn’t sure he liked.  “I could use a fresh up-and-coming scientist to help as a consultant for some of my new designs.”

“I’m not gonna be your startup slave,” Ed said.  “That’s why you have Al.”

Speaking of the perfectest person in the universe, his eyebrows were drawing together.  “It’s not a bad idea, Brother.”

Ed stared at him.  “Being Winr—”

“Working less at Has Beans,” Al said.  “Or at least picking up some later shifts now that you don’t have classes to worry about.”

Roy was rubbing a few knuckles very gently between Ed’s shoulder-blades, which felt so fucking transcendent that he thought he might melt into jelly and die.  That wouldn’t be so bad.

“You can think about it,” Roy said.  “That’s the beauty of this moment, isn’t it?  It’s an opportunity to assess how you want to prioritize your energy.”

“I have no idea how to do that,” Ed said.

In exquisite unison, everyone at the table said, “I know.”

  


* * *

  


The rest of the night was even blurrier—a hell of a lot more laughter; a hell of a lot more drinks; a hell of a lot of Ed snuggling into Roy’s arm and nuzzling at his jaw and smiling goopily, probably.

He remembered… getting coaxed into drinking a hell of a lot of water; Roy driving them home; bursting into giggles when he crashed into a doorway, while Roy’s hands moved frantically around his head to see if he’d done any actual damage to himself—

When he cracked his eyes open the next morning, the whole world seemed hazy and warm and white.  He tried blinking a few times, but the cloudy fuzz wouldn’t quite clear out of his cranium; there was… sunlight, and… sheets, and…

…Roy, nestling in, sliding an arm around his waist, pressing their foreheads together, and smiling at him like he was some kind of fucking miracle.

“Good morning, beautiful,” Roy said.

“M’not,” Ed said.  His voice came out froggy and faint, and trying to clear his throat made his head throb a little bit—way less than he expected, though; he must’ve had more water than… well, shit.  He must’ve had a _lake_.  “What time s’it?”

Roy lifted his head to look without shifting his arm away from Ed’s body, and that was… about the best thing ever.  “Ah… eleven thirty.”

“Holy shit,” Ed said.

“I daresay you needed the rest,” Roy said.

“I guess,” Ed said.  “It’s, like, lunchtime.”  He attempted to sit up and start rubbing his eyes, carefully shifting backwards so that he wouldn’t displace Roy’s arm at his waist.  “God, I haven’t slept this fucking late since…”  High school.  The start of it, before he’d gotten the work permit for weekends.  And maybe the day after his twenty-first birthday, but he didn’t remember much of that.  “…a long fucking time.”

He stretched both arms up over his head, trying to get his right shoulder to pop without jarring it too much, and when the oversized T-shirt he was wearing for some reason rode up, Roy wriggled in and kissed at the skin of his side.

Ed plucked at the shirt, trying not to lower his arms; giving Roy a faceful of cotton seemed like a poor thank-you for the gesture.  “Where did this come from?”

“You said you were cold,” Roy said.  “But ‘not, like, cold-cold, just, like, mm, shivery-cold’, apparently—” Roy was looking up at him intently to begin with, and then his eyes got to gleaming, and Ed’s guts clenched in the _best_ fucking way.  “And then you asked me to fuck you into the mattress—an offer I regretfully declined—and then you pouted, and then I put you in a pair of my pajamas, and that cheered you up.  Then you did a very mediocre job of brushing your teeth, and then you collapsed.”

Ed could feel his face reddening.  His face was a fucking asshole, for the record.  “Sorry.  I’m a dumbass when I’m drunk.”

“You’re not,” Roy said, grinning.  “Then or any other time.  Besides.”  He tugged on the T-shirt a little.  “For some reason I haven’t quite sorted out, I absolutely love seeing you in my clothes.”

Ed snorted, despite the fact that the heat in his face was spreading down his chest—and further down from there.  “Probably some kind of possessive thing.”

“Possibly,” Roy said.  “There’s also the fact that it’s agonizingly adorable.”

Ed wrinkled his nose.

“Case in point,” Roy said.

“Barf,” Ed said.

“I’m glad you didn’t do that yesterday,” Roy said.  “I was worried for a while.  Al was very careful to be sure that you had a full dinner, and I’ve never seen someone down so many glasses of water in one sitting.”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “He’s a mother hen sometimes, I swear.”  He blinked a little more, assessed the sheer fucking glory of his position, considered the gorgeous weight of Roy’s arm against him, and stifled a sigh.  “Speaking of which, though, I gotta pee, or I’m gonna die.”

Roy drew his arm back like he’d been burned.  “Go, go, good Lord.”  He waited until Ed was halfway across the room, in a perfect position to turn and see him sprawled on the bed, blankets bunched around him, looking like a fucking dream incarnate.  “Would you like to go get brunch afterwards?”

“Fuck, yes,” Ed said.

“And perhaps some of that later on?”

“Fuck, _yes_.”

Roy rolled onto his back, folding his hands behind his head, eyes closed, smug face absolutely fucking perfect.  “I do so love celebration sex.”

“No kidding,” Ed said.

“Not a whit.”

Ed folded his arms.  “You realize it’s also unemployment sex.”

“Not really,” Roy said.  “You still have another job, and you won’t be without this one for long.”  He propped himself up on his elbows, grinning.  “Re _lax_ , Ed.”  At Ed’s scowl, the grin only widened.  “You know what I love even more than sex of any variety?”

“Chocolate,” Ed said.  “Bacon.  I dunno.”

“You,” Roy said.

“ _Eugh_ ,” Ed said, and he made a break for the bathroom before Roy could see him smiling like a goddamn dork.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like the record to show that I actually love the convenience and consistency of Subway. I just love talkin' shit even more.
> 
> Also: I will be back next week with the as-yet-untiled Part 5, to start cleaning up this mess. I promise! But if the last few endings have left you screaming at your screen, _don't read this yet_.  Wait until next week's update – it won't fix everything, ~~and it will make some things worse~~ , but it will make a start on the fixing of the very large pile of broken shit that the end of this sucker will hand you.
> 
> tl;dr translation: I DON'T WANT ANY OF YOU TO BE ANY MORE UPSET THAN YOU ENJOY BEING ♥ TAKE CARE OF YOURSELVES ♥
> 
>  
> 
> **RECAP:** We left off with present-day!Ed getting the whole story out of Hohenheim and finding out that Hohenheim leaving was rather simply motivated by things Hohenheim prioritized ahead of his family. We left past-tense!Ed having just gotten his doctorate and having no idea what the hell to do next, although he impressed the hell out of his thesis committee.

Ed straggles over to his hotel a little after six, just to drape himself across the bed for a couple minutes in the hopes of fortifying himself before he forges back out for food.  He hasn’t really gotten a chance to eat anything since he and Hohenheim had scones at eleven thirty or whenever it was—with blackcurrant jam and something called clotted cream, which sounds fucking disgusting but is actually pretty great.  It didn’t exactly make for a heavy meal, though, so he’s ready to eat… anything.  He’d chance the headboard if he felt like he could move.  His shoulder’s taken up a deep, persistent throbbing pattern to make sure that he stays awake.

Hohenheim went back to Oxford after their perambulatory chat, which left Ed time to run to a meeting with a couple of faculty from half a dozen institutions.  They liaised at the British Library and just sort of hung around talking shit—and a bit of science—which made it by far the most enjoyable engagement Ed’s had on this trip so far.  Exhausting as _hell_ , though.

His phone’s vibrating.

He rolls over onto his back and drags it out of his pocket.  He’s been trying not to bother Roy, who’s probably knee-deep in case files and wild-eyed with stress; or Al, who’s probably going to be monitoring Winry’s blood pressure every thirty seconds until she threatens to rename the cat something seriously profane.  But maybe one of them is bothering _him_.  Maybe Winry already needs cat name suggestions.  Maybe—

It’s Riza.

Ed’s heart starts to bang—so hard his whole chest shudders.

Maybe it’s nothing.  That’s what Roy always tells him to say to himself—maybe it’s nothing at all.  The world isn’t always a terrible place, or it wouldn’t have Al in it; sometimes surprises aren’t _bad_ —not as bad as what he’s thinking, anyway.  Maybe Roy’s phone broke.  Maybe he lost his voice.  Maybe he’s buried in a ‘Bachelor’ marathon, and Riza can’t get him to peel his ass off the couch, so she needs Ed to pretend he’ll withhold sex to scare the bastard out of his trance.

Shit.

Ed swipes his thumb properly on the second try.  “Hello?”

“Edward,” Riza says.  “Don’t panic.”

_Fuck_.

“Too late,” he chokes out.  It can’t be—if it was really bad—she wouldn’t be speaking calmly; he’d be able to hear that she’d been crying if Roy’s—if something— “What h—”

“Roy collapsed in court,” she says.

He listens to the slow drumbeat of his own pulse.  He must be breathing.  Right?

“I shouldn’t have said it that way,” she says.  “He—fainted, in the middle of the jury selection.  And clocked himself on the table on the way down and split his chin open.  He then refused to leave and proceeded to finish his questions while holding a paper towel to his face, which I think impressed everyone, so it may honestly have improved our prospects for this case.”

Presumably the ceiling is not actually spinning, since this wasn’t advertised as a secret disco/acid-trip hotel.  “He’s—I mean, he’s—okay?  Where—”

“They stitched him up at the ER,” Riza says.  “I’m sure he’ll mostly be lamenting the blight on his precious face.”  She’s probably right.  “He’s upstairs now pretending like he’s sleeping instead of trying to hear me, but I think I’m too far into the kitchen.”

Ed swallows, breathes, swallows again.  “Is—they checked him out while he was there, right?  Ran a couple tests?  Do they know…?”

Riza sighs softly.  “Everything seems normal.  He’s trying to convince me he just forgot to eat, and it was too warm in the courtroom.”  She’s silent for a second, which is a bad fucking sign.  “I don’t think he has been eating properly, but it’s nothing to do with forgetfulness.  I don’t suppose he’s sleeping much, either.  It’s—the trial.”

Ed lays his hand over his eyes, which is better than letting the disco ceiling make him dizzy.  “He said—it wasn’t that bad.  Sort of a routine insurance thing.  Why’s he…?”

This silence tells a long fucking story, but he doesn’t know the plot.

“What?” Ed asks.

“On second thought,” Riza says quietly, “I’m not surprised he didn’t mention it.  He should have.  I know why he didn’t, but he should have.”

Ed pinches the bridge of his nose to give himself something to focus on.  His pulse is light, light, light and swift—fluttering in his throat, trilling up the back side of his sternum.

“Tell me,” he says.  “Please.”

She wouldn’t leave him dangling from the edge of a fucking cliff like this—not if she feels strongly that Roy should have shared this with him, whatever the fuck it is.

But as the latest installment of the silence stretches out on the scratchy line, he starts to wonder if maybe this time, it’s just too m—

“Bradley’s going on trial,” she says, “for war crimes.”

Even just that fucking name casts a huge shadow.

“Roy’s been called as a witness,” Riza says.

Ed opens his mouth to ask the question, but the word doesn’t come.

“He was involved,” Riza says.  “I don’t know how much.”

Something cold and bitter bubbles up Ed’s throat.  “I need to talk to him.”

“I know,” Riza says.  “Hold on.”

Ed doesn’t dare to look at the fucking ceiling; it’s probably whirling like a pinwheel.  He keeps his hand over his eyes, like the weight of it is pinning him here—to the bed, to the world, to reality.  Like maybe if he lies really fucking still, this will un-happen, and everything will be oka—

“He’s asleep,” Riza says at half-volume.  “But I’m supposed to wake him up at intervals in case he has a concussion.  I can probably have him on Skype in an hour.”

Ed doesn’t know how he’s supposed to last that long.  “Sure.  Sounds—good.”  He swallows; it sticks.  “I—thank you, by the way.  For looking after him.  For—all of it.”

“Of course,” she says.

“All right,” he says.  “About an hour?”

“That’s right.”

“Okay.”  He breathes—once, twice, three times.  That’s something.  “Thanks.  Um—’bye.  Take care, okay?”

“You, too,” she says.

He taps to end the call and drops the phone onto the bed beside him.

His heart—

—thuds.  Hard and quick; relentless, desperate.

He can’t even fucking tell at this point whether the tightening of his guts—everything’s seizing up, squeezing in, clenching like it’s trying to brace itself for something—has any hunger left in it at all.  Logically he knows he should fucking eat something.  He’s got an hour.  He could… He’ll just—go outside.  He’ll just lift himself up off of this bed and onto his feet, and he’ll go outside.  If he sees something at one of the nearby places that doesn’t make him want to retch, then he’ll buy it.  Simple.

He probably should have predicted that even the getting up part is way more complicated than he bargained for.

He slides to the edge of the mattress, puts his feet down, tries to test them with a portion of his weight, waits a second to see if the gooeyness in his knees is planning to solidify (it’s not), and then cautiously stands.  Everything seems more or less stable—or, at least, he doesn’t fall flat on his fucking ass right out of the gate, so that’s something.

He takes a couple of deep breaths, curling and uncurling his hands.  The throb of his shoulder seems sort of distant, but he knows that if he ignores it, it’ll get worse just to spite him.  Probably it’s chug-some-Advil time.  It’ll hit him faster if he takes it on an empty stomach, too.  It’s not like he needs that liver anyway.

He fumbles his phone back into his pocket, then gingerly kneels down by his laptop bag to go rooting for painkillers.  They’re exactly where Roy said they’d be—a dozen fucking packets; the man is a miracle.

And a—

What?

A liar?

A withholder?

Some kind of criminal?

_Fuck_.  Ed’s vision actually swims for a second under the cresting fucking tidal wave of fear.  Surely this doesn’t—surely it’s all just—

A misunderstanding?

Not as bad as it sounds?

If it was either of those fucking things, Roy would have told him.

Wouldn’t he?

Ed keeps reaching for pieces of a universe he recognizes, and they keep just—splitting.  Splitting, and crumbling, and slipping away.

He wants to talk to Al.

He needs to _eat_ something.

What would he even say if he got Al on the line?  He doesn’t know anything yet.  He doesn’t know anything at all—except for the rushing background roar of the blood in his ears; the force of it making his fingers tremble.  He doesn’t know anything except the voice echoing up to his head from the center of him.

_You knew it.  You knew it from the start.  You knew “too good to be true” is a law in your life, not just some stupid platitude.  You knew that someday, somehow, something was going to go horribly fucking wrong._

And it’s his own damn fault, isn’t it?  How could he _not_ have seen it?  Roy must have known about this—for weeks, maybe more.  How could Ed not have sensed or noticed or intuited a fucking thing?

Is he really paying that little fucking attention to the human being he proclaims to love?

Roy’s a good actor, obviously—he wouldn’t be able to fake composure in a court of law otherwise; he wouldn’t have a job if he didn’t know how to lie, and how to spin different aspects of the truth.

But this is on a different level than just _No, honey, I’m fine_ bullshit.   This has been hollowing him out from the inside, for fuck knows how long.

And Ed didn’t have the slightest goddamn idea.

What’s _wrong_ with him?  What’s missing in him as a person—as a _significant other_ , as one consciousness professing devotion to another—that he doesn’t see this shit?  Is there some kind of communicative frequency most people are tuned into that’s just fucking absent in the way his brain’s wired up?  Are there supposed to be flashing neon signs about this kind of shit, and he’s just always looking in the other damn direction?

He pats at his pockets to make sure he’s got both his phone and his wallet, then has to pull the latter out anyway to make sure it still contains the keycard to this room.  When he’s verified with his own two eyes that he won’t lock his dumb ass out, he drags his reluctant feet to the door, and then down the hall, and then down the stairs, and then out into the city again—not far.  Just to the fucking Subway at the end of the street that backs against the hotel.

He’s not so different from Hohenheim after all—is he?

He’s every bit as fucking self-absorbed.  He’s just subtler about it.  He’s just a fucking parasite, leaching the love right out of everybody dumb enough to give a shit about him and feeding it into his own personal crap.  He never gives back.  He just digs his teeth in and hangs on until somebody finally shakes him hard enough to knock him loose.

Somebody should step on him next time.  Splatter his guts out; end the cycle; finally, finally crush him dead.

What is this even about?  What could possibly—Roy’s not a _criminal_.  He’s not a fucking _killer_.  Is he?  What even constitutes a war crime?  How much input did he even have into whatever the fuck this Bradley asshole did?

Ed doesn’t know much of fucking anything about that whole stage of Roy’s life—he doesn’t know much about _any_ stage of Roy’s life, but this one’s a fucking black box full of secrets.  He just never wanted to pry.  Roy’s own memories are always tormenting him; digging it up to try to get the scoop on his demons would’ve been a huge fucking dick move, right?  It was none of his goddamn business unless Roy wantedto share it.  The past is in the past; it’s over and done with and gone.

Except when it isn’t.

Except right now.

The upshot of Subway—other than the near-instantaneousness of acquisition—is that waiting for his stomach to settle isn’t going to compromise the taste, since it’ll just be a slightly soggier combination of processed pieces if he lets it sit around.

He totes his little plastic bag back up to the hotel room, trying as hard as he can fucking manage to think about anything fucking else.  He needs some tea.  He needs a sedative—no, a tranquilizer.  He needs a nap.  He needs a break.  He needs to be somebody else—somebody who gets this stuff right; somebody who’s figured out how to function.  Somebody who won’t get the rug yanked out from underneath them every time they dare to think they’re starting to get settled.  Somebody who doesn’t get their ass kicked by the fucking universe as a matter of course every time things almost make sense.

He puts his sandwich-like-item on the nightstand, plugs in his laptop cord, opens the computer, and sits up against the headboard.  He’s still got twenty minutes until the end of the designated hour since Riza’s call.

He sets the computer aside and gets up and goes to put the room’s complimentary kettle on.  What kind of tea are they even offering?  Are they going to charge him for every bag he uses up, or is it like Kleenex or something?  He could use a Kleenex.  He could use a _lobotomy_.  Could they just excise his fucking overactive amygdala and be done with it?  No more fucking anxiety.  No more shots of adrenaline at three in the morning over nothing; no more heartbeat slinging around his whole body like he’s on goddamn cocaine.

The decaf options provided by this hospitable purple hell include a mint and a chamomile.  The flower shit is probably better for this purpose, even though both of the little packages wax embarrassingly poetic about their soothing undertones and whatever shit.  His hands are shaking so much it takes him three tries to open the goddamn fucking packet.  Maybe he shouldn’t even try to deal with boiling water right now.

Maybe this is a job for science.  You could totally develop a tea that would just release a flood of fucking endorphins in the brain—and maybe even mess with the dopamine receptors so that it wouldn’t just be a rush of ecstasy on _top_ of the anxiety and shit.  It’d probably permeate the bloodstream pretty fast—especially if you hadn’t eaten anything but a scone and some gnarly-cream since the morning.  It might very well fucking work.

Not that it’d be legal, but that’s a problem for lawyers, not for science.

God.  Lawyers.  One in particular.  What the fuck?  What the _fuck_?  Why wouldn’t Roy just— _warn_ him?

He starts the kettle and manages to get the teabag into the little paper cup with the hotel logo on it.  The cup is just as purple as everything else.  This place is fucking weird.

He goes back to the bed, sits down on the edge, logs into Skype, and turns his laptop volume all the way up.

Roy’s not on yet.

He looks over at his sandwich.  He looks over at the kettle.  He looks down at the screen.

He should be tired, from the way his heart keeps racing—like he’s been running; like it’s a strain.  The pain in his shoulder’s keeping pace; the tempo’s vicious.  Fuck this shit; fuck _all_ this shit; couldn’t—

Couldn’t Riza have woken Roy up right then?

That’s a shitty thought; that’s uncharitable; _God_ , Roy’s probably hurting; he was probably slouched in a crappy plastic chair in the ER for hours on end, holding scratchy paper napkins against his chin.  He probably feels like shit.  He needs that sleep.

Ed’s an asshole.

It’s no damn wonder shit like this always goes so wrong.  He’s been forgetting—how to be careful; how to stay humble; how close to hold the cards against his chest.  He let his guard down.  He rested on all these bullshit laurels and started to get lazy, and cocky, and soft.

He deserves this.

Doesn’t he?

Hubris.

That’s the word.

The computer makes a bubbly bounce noise so loud that he startles enough to smack his shoulder against the headboard, and _that_ —

Is fucking _agony_ , but—

Not enough to stop him from reaching out one shaky hand and clicking the button for a video call.

  


* * *

  


Funny how nothing and everything changed when he finally wrangled his way into that doctorate.

Looking in the mirror was the same.  Trading stupid quips with Roy was the same.  Draping himself across Al’s couch and having existential crises was, regrettably, really no different either.

But, as it turned out, some head honcho from the department called him nine days after he’d defended—which he remembered in exquisite detail because it was a Monday, and the phone rang while he and Roy were trying to kick the week off with a pre-work quickie which had been intended for the shower but ended up on the floor.

Roy lifted his mouth from Ed’s throat long enough to ask, “Expecting anyone?”

Ed said something to the effect of “Mmnngh”, which was as close as he could get to “No” with Roy’s dick pressed to his, the weight of Roy’s hips perfect-heavy- _hot_ —

“Could be important,” Roy said, and he was awfully fucking spry for someone who _purported_ to be thirty-five, although the way his hand swept across his lower back as he shifted wasn’t idle—or Ed didn’t think so; Roy’d been doing that a hell of a lot lately.  “Local area code.  Here.”

Which was how Ed got offered his dream job while lying on Roy Mustang’s bedroom carpet, buck naked and splashed with lube.

  


* * *

  


He was supposed to move into his lab space in the middle of August—which required him to have _people_ for a lab, which required him to interview students and potential postdocs and maybe a lab manager, which required him to put out a call for applications, which required him to get a website together, which required him to lock down the space, which required him to figure out the furniture, which—

“Funemfuckingployment,” he said, dropping onto the couch the night after he had moved all of the tables around and then almost fallen asleep with his head in the fume hood.

Roy obligingly lifted up the papers in his lap so that Ed could settle there instead, which—

God.

“I think you’re legally employed,” Roy said.  “The contract’s been filed.”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “Only they didn’t say I had to be a fucking moving man.”

“You’re a man who’s moved me quite a bit,” Roy said.

Ed would have punched him—or a least screamed an expletive—if he hadn’t been so beat.  “ _Eugh_.”

Roy laughed softly.  “Sorry.  Even for me, that was a bit much.”

Ed reached up and touched his jaw, then his cheek, then the circles under his beautiful fucking eyes.  “You all right?”

The way the corners of Roy’s eyes crinkled when he smiled was fucking criminal, and it _still_ made Ed’s heart skip a fucking beat.  “Of course.”

“That’s a cop-out answer,” Ed said—but gently, because… because.  “What’re you working on?”

The sigh was more honest than the laugh had been.  “I… believe it or not, my commanding officer from Afghanistan is… well, he needs legal help, apparently.”

Roy’s grip on the pen was still loose, but his jaw had tightened, and Ed would’ve known anyway.  Having to think back to the war stuff, to deployment, to all of the shit that happened there, to all of the shit that cornered him in the darkest places in his own mind—nothing fucked Roy up quite like that.  Nothing pulled at his edges until they came jagged; nothing else ever seemed to touch him, but there was a part of him…

There was a part of him that hadn’t made it home.  And it had weight, it had gravity, it had _power_ —it had the power to pull him back.

This was the place where walking got delicate.  Eggshells—explosives underneath the sand, and heat waves streaming towards the sky.

Ed nudged his knuckles at Roy’s cheekbone in a way that was supposed to be encouraging, although it might’ve just been dumb.  He could never really tell; so far he’d been really lucky, and Roy just seemed to be physically incapable of disdaining his idiotic attempts at affectionate gestures, but he couldn’t help feeling like it was just a matter of time—like eventually he’d do something stupid enough that it’d cross some narrow little line, and Roy would bat his hand away, and that’d be that.  Floodgates or some shit.

“No kidding,” he said for now, as levelly as he could.  “What’s going on?”

Roy smiled at him—faintly, and then it faded.  He raised the folder he’d been reading.  The man fucking loved a good manila folder; the house was full of them.  “Accusations of embezzlement.  I don’t…” He frowned at something invisible in the middle distance, and Ed lowered his hand, laying it on Roy’s shoulder instead.  “I don’t think he’d do it.  I—maybe it’s naïve, but I trust him.  I believed that he was virtually faultless, once—I’m certainly not young enough for that anymore, but I do believe _in_ him.”  He rubbed his eyes with his free hand and then set the folder aside on the end table.  “Bradley was good to me.  Time to be good back, I suppose.  In the meantime—” He ran his fingers through Ed’s bangs, sweeping them back, smoothing them out, and _fuck_ , that was heavenly— “I think the both of us would probably benefit from a good night’s sleep, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  It was about the best he could do when all he really wanted was to start purring.  “Yeah, I… yeah.”

Roy laughed—gently, always so fucking gently, like he knew that was actually worse; like he knew it ground Ed’s hard-won walls down to rubble faster than any forcefulness ever could have done—and leaned down to kiss Ed’s forehead.  “All right,” he said.

But he wasn’t.  He wasn’t, and Ed could tell, but it was like his hands and his tongue were fucking tied.

  


* * *

  


Ed had always thought that the worst thing ever was starting the quarter as an overworked, underfunded, frazzled, sleepless grad student and trying to muddle his way through classes so that he could stagger back to the lab afterward.

Turned out the worst thing was starting the quarter as an overworked, underfunded, frazzled, sleepless _professor_ , because you were expected to know what the fuck you were doing in the midst of all the goddamn chaos.

The truth was, teaching a bunch of freaking classes and cramming lab and—when you could manage it—life into the gaps was just as much of a scheduling nightmare as TAing them had been; on top of which the professor was expected to know ridiculous shit like what the class was about, what reading went where on the syllabus, what the homework looked like, what the TAs should emphasize because it’d be on the final or whatever…

It was so much power—in a weird, ivory-tower-bound, academic kind of way, obviously—that it left him feeling kind of like he was drifting.  Too many choices.  Too many options.  Too much shit to do; where the hell was he supposed to start?

There wasn’t much choice but to do the usual damn thing—attack it from as many angles as he could handle, with all the force he could muster, and hope to any benevolent deity-ish item listening that this time he might win.

He’d taken progressively fewer shifts at Has Beans over the course of the summer until he was pretty much considered a ghost over there—Rosé and Marta missed him; Russell continued to be an asshole; he still went in to get coffee beans a lot, and tried to swing by at off-hours when he could to catch up with the ladies.  No surprise, though, that as his class schedule heated up, all of the unnecessary connections in his life started to disintegrate in the crucible.  He just didn’t have time for friends; he barely had time for _Al_ , and Al was like oxygen, and…

He barely saw Roy, either.  With all of this lesson plan shit and lab establishment shit (and grant-researching, and paper-writing, and “networking”, and keeping-up-with-the-latest stuff in as many fields as he could stand so that he didn’t fall woefully behind—), he was hardly ever home except to sleep, although he really, _really_ tried to make it back for dinner whenever he could.

Roy was tired.  Roy was tired and getting tireder; he was sleeping like crap; there was a tightness to his eyes that Ed had never seen before, and a similar one in his jaw—not quite clenched, but it was like he was holding it there.  It was like he was holding himself together.  He’d wake up almost every night; whether it was the dreams or just general brain static, Ed didn’t know, because he wouldn’t talk about it.  It was just “Fine, fine, sorry” in the thick dark of two in the morning; and the next day, over hasty cereal and coffee and clumsy kisses in the doorway, it was “Don’t worry about me, love”, and then a gentle push out the door.

Ed tried to remember to text him as much as humanly possible—just little shit, just _hi_ and _how’s stupid tuesday treating you_ and _you want me to pick up dinner maybe?_ Just little outreach touches to try to demonstrate how much he fucking cared, because sometimes, these days, Roy got so quiet and so distant when the noise of the day calmed down, and they settled on the couch or in bed or whatever shit, that Ed didn’t know…

Sometimes it was like Roy had left himself and vanished off to somewhere else, and Ed wasn’t sure how to find him.  You couldn’t turn to the love of your fucking life and say _I think I’m losing you to the demons in your head, but I don’t know how to fight them, and I don’t know if you can keep doing it alone_.

He dragged his ass out of bed early on a Saturday a couple weeks into the quarter, scrubbing at his face.  When he lowered his hands, Roy was watching him, smiling slightly, eyes half-lidded and so fucking warm.

“’Morning,” Roy murmured.

“Hey, sexy,” Ed said.  His whole fucking chest felt like it was swelling; he sat down on the edge of the mattress again and leaned in and buried his hands in Roy’s hair and kissed him for… a while.  A long time.

Roy’s fingers curled into the hair at the nape of his neck.  When they drew back, his eyes opened so fucking slow, and then they fixed on Ed’s face like he was the only goddamn thing in the goddamn universe—

“Are you heading in to the lab?” Roy asked softly.

Ed’s heart clenched so hard and so fast it took his fucking breath away, which was clichéd as hell and also fucking painful.  “Well—I was, I—”

Roy laid a fingertip against his lips.  “It’s all right.  I was just thinking… why don’t I try to get some work done today, too, and then perhaps we can both leave a little early on Friday and go out for dinner?”

Ed’s whole chest was full, full of _Roy_ , full of fucking adoration and gratitude…

And guilt.  Because he didn’t deserve this; he’d never done a damn thing to earn someone so fucking perfect and so fucking—nice.

He smiled, and kissed Roy’s finger, and smiled a little more at the way Roy wriggled, trying not to laugh.  Roy had the best morning hair ever.  Roy had the best… everything.

“That sounds great,” he said.  “I’ll take off at four or something—sound okay?”

“Sounds beautiful,” Roy said, and he looked like he just _meant_ it, and Ed was such a piece of shit for taking him away from someone more deserving.

“Okay,” Ed said.  He leaned in for another kiss, and Roy shifted up to meet him, and… fuck.  Maybe it was selfish, but he just… he couldn’t have given it up for the world right then.  “’M g’na take a shower,” he mumbled against Roy’s mouth.

“Mm,” Roy murmured back.

It was hard, too, because he’d never had anything this precious since… Al.  And Al was sacred; Al was a _fact_ ; Al wouldn’t… he couldn’t fuck that up.

He touched his forehead to Roy’s and then darted off to get his clothes and wind today down as fast as he was fucking able.

  


* * *

  


Sunday was gorgeous—Sundays always were, with Roy; Sundays were sun-dappled sheets and long-ass showers and curling up on the couch to drink the coffee real, real slow.  Sundays, they lived the kind of life he’d always imagined other people having but never quite dared to dream of for himself, because if he thought about it—if he thought about it concretely and gave the wisp of fantasy a breath of life—the universe was going to tear it down and wrench it out of his greedy fucking hands.

Right?

Sometimes being with Roy made him feel like he’d teleported into a different world—a better one, a kinder one.  A cosmos that didn’t hate him.  Where the laws were different, and Murphy wasn’t king, and sometimes things just stayed up instead of crashing back down to Earth after they started arcing skyward.

“Hey,” Ed said after Roy had read out all of the updates on a funny legal stories blog he liked, and he himself had improvised lay summaries of a couple super-technical articles in _Cell_.  “Are you… okay?”

He had his head in Roy’s lap, so that he could flick through the magazine, and Roy could scroll on his laptop on the couch arm with one hand and stroke his fingers through Ed’s hair with the other.  The solitary downside was that it was about a billion times harder to catalogue the nuances of Roy’s expression from this angle—and nu-fucking-anced it was.

“Yes,” Roy said, but he said it so fucking slowly that it wasn’t exactly the most convincing thing Ed had heard in his life.  Or even in the last few minutes.  “It’s… Bradley’s managed to get himself much more mired in all of it than I realized when I took it on—it’s becoming one of those sorts of things that expands to fill the amount of time that you allot to it.  And that’s good, because every hour is paid for; but it’s also… well.  I couldn’t have said ‘no’.  I owe him too much for that; we go too far back, and he meant a great deal to me then.”  He smiled, similarly unconvincingly; his eyes stayed hazy, and distant, and… sad.  “Even past all that, it—dredges up a lot of memories I spend a lot of time suppressing, so it’s a lot more than it seems on the surface.”

“I know,” Ed said.  “I mean—I know that about you, and also I… get that.  I understand that; I’ve been there.”

“Not my favorite haunt,” Roy said.

“Yeah,” Ed said.

Roy brushed his bangs back from his forehead, smiling a little more strongly.  “It’s all right.  I’ve gotten through worse, and I’m not _too_ old and wretched and decrepit yet.”

“Only a little,” Ed said.

Roy winked.  “I believe you’re the one who’s little, my dear.”

Ed gaped at him.  “That’s not what I—” Roy started laughing, so Ed hit his arm—but not with much of any force at all.  “You bastard!”

Roy leaned down and kissed him, and Ed tried—and pathetically failed—to hold a grudge.

  


* * *

  


Figured, then, that Monday crept up behind him, nailed him in the back of the kneecaps, clubbed him over the head while he was falling, and kicked him while he was down.  Mondays were good for that.

It wasn’t anything _life-ruining_ , and he was trying to remember that and keep his cool, but—well, shit.  His favorite postdoc candidate had picked Harvard over him, which she said wasn’t personal, but how could it not be, when it was a decision based on interviews with him and discussions of research and shit?  And then the brand-new minus-80 freezer fritzed out and practically exploded and _then_ locked itself shut with his samples in it; and then his extremely shy but totally brilliant grad student/de facto lab manager had to run out in a flood of tears to go jump on a plane home to Brazil because her father had just had a heart attack, and she was such a mess, and he felt terrible for her, and he felt even _more_ terrible for being weirdly sort of jealous that her dad mattered to her so much.  And then he found out that the department had been advertising the NIH grant submission deadline wrong, and it was actually due at the end of _this_ week, and yeah, he’d started, but he’d been counting on having those days, and also on having someone else to run the place while he slaved away on it, and also on having _fucking samples that would come out of his fucking freezer_ —

He dropped into one of his brand-spankin’-new rolling chairs and kicked his feet at the floor (fucking things were designed for fucking tall-ass giant people; it was a conspiracy; always had been) to propel himself over to the far wall of the lab.  He positioned himself directly under the clock, leaned back, pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, and counted out three full minutes in time with the ticking of the second-hand.

Then he got up, took a deep breath, shook as much of the sludgy negative energy as he could out of his body, squared his shoulders, and strolled over to the facilities office for the building to see if they had any idea why his freezer was possessed.

They didn’t.  Although they could have a maintenance guy come look at it.  One of them laughed weakly when he suggested an exorcist instead.  They were all looking at him like they expected him to… freak out, or something.  Like he was going to try to get them in trouble for the fact that his fucking freezer was malfunctioning, which really had nothing to do with them at all except that it was technically shared equipment, so they were supposed to manage the maintenance crap.

“What?” he asked after a second or two of the general staring and stuff.

“You’re so… chill,” a girl who looked too young to be working legally—not that Ed could talk—said in something not unlike awe.

“Oh,” he said.  Was that really a novelty around here?  He supposed—thinking of the frantic research mania of most of the students and faculty he knew—that maybe it was.  “Thanks, I guess.”

The girl blushed.

…the hell?

“We’ll let you know when the rep can come out,” an older woman told him.

“Sounds good,” Ed said.  “You know where to find me, right?”

“Better believe it,” the woman said.

There wasn’t much to be done except to bury himself in the grant work in the meantime, so he started shoveling.  It was eerily fucking quiet, having a lab space all to yourself—and sure, there’d been times he’d been in Izumi’s lab alone, after everyone else had gone home or when he’d popped in at some ungodly hour or if everybody else had lunch plans like real people, but that was… not quite the same.  Their equipment made noises; their computers whirred; other people walked through, whatever.  It wasn’t a _silence_ as profound as this—just him, and the clacking of his laptop keys, and the ticking of the clock on the wall.  Just him, and his own damn thoughts.

It was sort of a relief, actually, when you started thinking about it that way.  It was so hard to _be_ alone in the world they lived in; it was so hard to build yourself a Fortress of fucking Solitude to listen to the play of your own brainwaves sometimes.  Maybe it was a blessing in disguise, having to drop everything and focus on the echoes of his half-formed ideas, trying to twist them into something cogent—something whole.  Trying to origami-fold their asses into a recognizable shape.

It was the kind of challenge he lived for, in some ways.  Not so bad.  Not so bad at all.

  


* * *

  


The week went on much in the same vein, but by Tuesday night, the silence was getting to him—wearing away at his edges, picking with little needle-fingers at his constitution, slowly but steadily dragging him into a tar pit of misery and self-doubt.  It was a stupid thing—he didn’t _want_ to talk to anyone, but he just sort of… needed his existence acknowledged, or some shit.  Needed other human beings’ reactions to feel like he was really alive.  This whole drifting-professor-ghost shit was not as cool as he would have expected.  He’d had a class to teach early Tuesday morning, and he’d _felt_ the simple weight of the students’ attention warming up his soul, but by the time he crawled off campus, that’d been a long fucking time ago.

Roy wasn’t in yet when he got home, which was a little unsettling—weird hours were one thing, but they meant more when somebody started at a consistent time like Roy did, because at this point he’d been at work _forever_.

Ed texted him a dumb little _hope everything’s going okay, gonna get food <3_ and popped out to the Thai place half a mile down the road, because he was in serious danger of starvation, which was not helping his stupid-ass mood.  The lights were on in the hall and the kitchen by the time he got back—he kicked his shoes off, which was a bit of a balancing act to do without dropping the takeout all over the floor, and stepped in right as Roy was reaching up to take plates down from the cabinet.

Roy set them down on the counter, turned, and smiled at him, and even tired—even bone-fucking-weary, even with shadows under his eyes that could’ve bred whole rooms full of darkness—he was just so damn gorgeous, and…

And Ed hoped he knew.  Ed hoped Roy knew all of it, because there weren’t words for most of the things boiling and bursting and building up in his heart.

“Hey, you,” Ed said, and it mostly came out stable.  “I’d ask how your day went, but I think I’ve got an idea.”

Roy gave him a grimace-smile.  “I wish it wasn’t the case, but I think I could say the same for you, dear heart.”

Ed set the bag full of styrofoam containers on the counter and started unwrapping—then he stopped, and turned, and put his arms around Roy instead.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I’ll be fine,” Roy said softly.  “You?”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “Had worse.”

  


* * *

  


They probably got about two hours—cumulatively, not all at once—of sleep that night.  Maybe two between the pair of them; it was hard to calculate shit like that at four in the morning, feeling gummy-eyed and cotton-mouthed and sticky-skinned and generally disgusting.

It must’ve been worse than Roy had said, because the dreams were waking him up every fucking hour, and he’d sit there shaking for another five, ten, fifteen minutes before he reached out for Ed’s arm, and then he’d spend another ten fucking minutes apologizing, and _then_ he’d still be shivering when they curled up, and he’d bury his face in Ed’s hair and breathe softly for a while, and Ed would have to wait another five or ten minutes after _that_ before his own fucking heart slowed down, and…

And he’d get maybe half an hour before Roy’s hands were on him, pushing him out of the way of something, shoving him down into the mattress for protection from a threat Ed couldn’t see or even start to understand—something that made _Roy Mustang_ , who was proud and suave and sexy as fuck, sit bolt upright in terror in the middle of the fucking night, something that almost brought him to fucking _tears_ a couple times a week—

It’d just been two on Monday—or two Ed woke up to, anyway; maybe he’d just been so fucking beat, and Roy’d been so fucking quiet…

As he lay there listening to Roy’s breathing slowly evening out, he couldn’t stop the vulture-thought circling, fucking slowly, over and over, around the circumference of his skull.

How much had he missed?

How much of Roy’s pain had he walked past, and slept through, and looked away from because he was so fucking preoccupied with his own damn shit?

That wasn’t fair.  That wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t right, and Roy supported him so fucking _fully_ —

Roy just—took care of him.  All of the goddamn time, Roy was touching him and holding him and stroking his hair back and pitching in and giving him advice and promising him that shit would be okay.  Roy had carried half the fucking boxes of shit into his lab; Roy had sat there puzzling over the centrifuge trying to figure out how to start it for him; Roy had fed him and soothed him and tucked him into bed every time he came home wrecked and ranting.

Roy was so much fucking better than he deserved.

Roy deserved so much fucking better than _him_.

He traced his fingertips feather-lightly down the curve of Roy’s arm where it was draped across his chest.  This man was just so fucking beautiful, inside and out, all over; everything he did, everything he said…

Ed wasn’t worthy of all that.  And it was an insult to Roy to keep pretending—wasn’t it?

Surely he resented it.

Surely he was tired, underneath—tired of faking it, tired of all the shit, tired of putting up with _Ed_.

Surely that was festering in him by now.  Some part of him must have hated Ed for trapping them in this thing, for worming his way into every crack and crevice of Roy’s life, for occupying all this damn space in his sanctuary.  Some part of him had to be disgusted with his recently-acquired parasite.

Ed drew his fingertips over the ridges of Roy’s knuckles, down the length of every finger and then up again, one by one.  It wasn’t fair.  It wasn’t right.  It wasn’t—equivalent.

Roy had to see that.  Did he think he was too old to start over and find someone who was good enough?  That was some bullshit; Roy could’ve snapped his fingers and brought any fine, young thing he wanted to their knees.  Did he feel invested?  Beholden?  _Obligated_?

Ed closed his eyes against the hazy gray half-light of five in the fucking morning, which had been getting progressively less familiar until this week.  He had to stop torturing himself with this train of thought, whether or not he could practically hear the whistle in the distance; whether or not he could smell the smoke.  It wasn’t doing him or Roy any good to speculate.  They just had to—talk about it.  Right?  Like civilized fucking adults.  Just—talk.  About how everything the world unraveled eventually.  About how the center could not hold and shit.  About how Ed felt like his grasp on his life and reality and the good things in the universe was slipping, and all of it was going to disintegrate underneath his hands.  About—

He tilted his head back and took a deep breath.  Roy sort of snuffled against his shoulder, which was heartbreakingly fucking cute.

It could wait.  It’d have to.  He’d be fine.

He’d always been fine.  He didn’t have a choice.

  


* * *

  


“I’m so sorry,” was the first thing Roy said after the alarm went off, and Ed had to swallow twice to make sure this was sleep-deprivation nausea and not the kind likely to make him barf on his boyfriend.

“Nah,” he said.  He kept the kiss short and sweet just in case; there weren’t a whole lot of things that could make a wakeup call this crappy any worse, but vomiting in your lover’s mouth was probably one of them.  “Shit happens.  It’s okay.”

Roy smiled at him, and if Ed looked half as worse for the wear as he did, they were gonna make a pretty pair of fucking zombies out there on the street.  Roy touched his cheek and then leaned their foreheads together.

“It isn’t,” he said, “but thank you.”

Ed covered Roy’s hand with his for a second and then slipped out from the embrace before his willpower broke, and he just dropped back into the fucking bed and went back to sleep.  “Don’t thank me ’til after you find out if I’ve used all the hot water.”

  


* * *

  


Slogging through a class as a student participant was one thing—the sludge-wading was a whole different fucking matter when you had to _lead_ the thing.

Either everybody saw how fucking exhausted he was, and nobody dared to raise their hand and ask him to slow down or speak coherent English for fear that he’d explode; or by some miracle he was making a passable amount of sense.  Whatever the case, the hours between him and getting to pass out in that bed again crawled by, sluggish as all hell but steady enough.

Roy texted right about lunchtime— _Going to be late again tonight. Could you put my light blue shirt in the wash when you get home?  Afraid dinner may be on you again too.  Sorry, sweetheart. <3_

Laundry and dinner Ed could handle; he sent back _of course, done deal. no sorries <3_ and hunkered down to his grant again.

Ironically enough, the National Institutes of Health seemed to want him dead, or at least have an insatiable craving for his blood, sweat, tears, and any other liquid misery he could muster.  Maybe they had, like, a huge flock of lawyers they had to keep employed by making them write pages and pages and pages of incomprehensible small print.  Ed supposed that if that had ended up being Roy’s job, he’d be in favor of it; somebody had to keep those people’s families fed and housed and clothed and…

And holy fucking _shit_ , this was never-ending, and he still had to re-label all of his diagrams and edit that last one in Photoshop because the colors had gotten all washed out, and he wanted to circle the tumor node anyway, and…

When he looked up, scrubbing at his gritty-ass fucking blob-eyes with the knuckles of both hands, it was five thirty.

“Fuckballs,” he said aloud to the empty lab.

There were some advantages to working completely alone, one of which was that nobody judged you if your knee-jerk curse words didn’t make any goddamn sense.

There were also disadvantages, including but not limited to the fact that a grand total of zero good Samaritans came to your aid if you started running around like decapitated poultry trying to call the Italian place and make an order while saving all your work and packing all your shit, which resulted in answers like “Must be by the centrifuge” to the question “Alfredo or marinara?”

Wasn’t this shit supposed to happen on Mondays, not Wednesdays?

Somehow he straggled out to the car—at which point he couldn’t remember whether he’d locked the fucking laboratory door or not, and you just _never knew_ when someone might want to shortcut the good shit and steal your results; and it would be one thing if his stupidity got his own shit jacked, but his grad student’s work was in there, too—

He trekked back.  He had indeed locked the fucking door to the fucking lab.  He trekked back-forward to the parking garage and dropped into the front seat of his car and spent a few seconds taking a couple of deep fucking breaths before he put the keys into the ignition.

The dashboard lit up.

He was almost out of gas.

“ _Fuck_ this day,” he said, which got him about as much response here as it would have in the lab.

There was a station on campus; he sputtered in pretty much in the nick of fucking time.  His windshield was a mess, but the way today was going, if he tried to scrub it, it’d start to rain, and he didn’t have a fucking umbrella, and his laptop bag wasn’t especially waterproof, and…

And he was going to be fine.  He was going to be fucking fine.

He was going to be late to get his goddamn takeout, but they were just going to have to deal with it; it wasn’t like they could give his food away to somebody else if he hadn’t paid for it yet.

…except, as he found out, it was.  And they could.

And they had.

“I’m so _sorry_ ,” the girl at the counter kept saying, and she looked like she was going to burst into tears, which Ed sympathized with pretty damn deeply right about now.

“It’s really okay,” he said.  “Is there… like, anything?”

Her eyes welled.  “The—the kitchen just closed—”

Of course it had.  “What happened to the other order, for the people that got mine?”

“Theirs was—huge catering,” the girl said, lip wobbling now.  He wanted to pat her shoulder or some shit.  “It was—eight bags, nine, I… I think—”

He tried at a weary laugh, which probably sounded more or less like a creaky-ass couch getting kicked.  “Got it.  Well.  It’s fine.  No problem.  I think we’ve got some sh—stuff, stuff—at home.”

Despite the couch sounds, she looked profoundly relieved.  “I—I’m just—we’re so sorry, sir, we—”

He waved his hand.  “Man, don’t call me ‘sir’.  That makes me sound a million years old.”  He put his hand out.  “I’m Ed.  And we’ll come back sometime; you guys are great.”

She shook his hand gingerly, eyes huge.  “I… Samanta.  Thank—you.”

“Don’t mention it,” he said.  He mustered a grin.  “I worked in a coffee shop for years—trust me.  I got you.”

Samanta smiled.

So at least there was that.

  


* * *

  


They did have some shit at home.  They had exactly one package of frozen tortellini, exactly one foil-wrapped object Sharpie-labeled “chicken”, and exactly one slightly wilty head of broccoli.  There was some butter and some cheese that didn’t look moldy (although it was always so hard to tell with white cheddar, which was secretly part of the reason Ed had always preferred the day-glo orange kind), and Roy was one of those people with an alphabetized spice cabinet, so… so.  Time to improvise.  Time to be a dinner hero.

And hopefully finish his fucking grant application while shit baked and boiled and whatever it was supposed to do.

Ed made echinacea tea while he got started, partly because he was starting to come unhinged enough that muttering “echinacea” to himself repeatedly seemed like fun.  Also it was probably supposed to be calming; most of those _drink-this-flower_ teas usually were.  He clicked his way back into his stupid app only to find that it had deleted all of his attachments for some reason, at which point he hissed at the screen (…unhinged) and then took a huge gulp of tea, which—

Was way too fucking hot, and it took all of the quavering remnants of his willpower to hold it in his mouth instead of spewing it all over his laptop screen—

He swallowed, feeling scalded straight fucking through; fire-swallowing was supposed to be a _voluntary_ circus act, right?  Then again, his whole life felt like a big-top farce sometimes—fuck’s _sake_ , that hurt—

After chugging some cold water, it felt like he could breathe again, and then the pasta water was boiling over; and then the chicken looked a little overdone on the outside, but when he cut one piece open to test it (after burning his hand on the tray because there was a _hole in the oven mitt_ , and the universe could really fucking quit now, because he _got the point_ ), it was still shiny fucking pink in the middle, so back in it went; and meanwhile he wasn’t sure whether he should sauté the broccoli or what, and what _was_ sautéing?  Did you just sort of put it in oil and swirl it around in the pan, or was that technically stir fry?

Well, whatever the fuck it was, Roy was going to want to Bobby Flay him alive if he didn’t have something on the table, so he splashed some olive oil in the pan after he’d gotten the pasta going, and then stirred the pasta while he waited for the oil to heat up, which was always a fun-slash-dangerous experiment given that you couldn’t _tell_ when the oil was hot, except by flicking water at it or putting in something that made it start spitting at you like that the dinosaur with the neck frill (dilophosaurus?), although he’d read that there was no paleontological evidence that it’d actually done that shit outside of “Jurassic Park”.  He figured he could put some cheese in with that, too—the broccoli, not the dinosaur—once he got it going.  Cheese made everything better.  Which was weird.  Well, _he_ was weird, or at least had a weird relationship with dairy products, but it wasn’t hisfault cheese was like milk’s firmer, nicer, eight-thousand-times more delicious cousin.

…right, testing oil.

…right, tending the pasta.

…right, broccoli; _right_ , he probably needed a utensil for this; holy hot damn, oil burns hurt like a bitch—

Wait, the chicken—

How long did tortellini need, anyway?  You couldn’t really throw a tortellini at the wall to see if it was done, could you?  Well, you _could_ , but it might not help.  Were they like ravioli, where if you kept them in too long, they exploded, and then you had a pot of boiling water and ravioli filling and a brother who was trying very hard not to laugh at you but wasn’t quite up to the task?

Fuck all of this cooking shit, anyway.  If they’d had any bread, he would’ve just made them some damn sandwiches.  He couldn’t fuck that up.  Unless he tried to toast them, in which case he could, and could also get the opportunity to introduce himself to some irritated firemen.

Damn it.  Damn _everything_.  The grant page had probably logged him out by now.

When he heard a key in the door, a cry of “ _Help_ ” jumped to his lips completely unbidden.  He frowned at himself—well, physically, at the stove; functionally, at himself—and half-turned to call, “Hey, you” over his shoulder instead.

“Something smells remarkably nice,” Roy said.  Keys jingled, and then something thumped softly on the floor in the hallway; probably that was Roy’s briefcase, shortly to be followed by his shoes.  Roy had a thing about removing his shoes and his suit jacket the second he got inside the door; it seemed like a psychological stripping-off-the-day thing, which Ed could definitely understand.  Sockfeet—make that the world’s best sockfeet—padded in, and then the world’s best hands were flirting with Ed’s waist, and the world’s best mouth was grazing down the side of his neck.  “The food’s appetizing, too.”

“Shut up,” Ed said, and no matter how goddamn tired he was, it was a struggle not to let his toes curl with the sheer fucking delight of feeling so damn lo—

Oh, shit.

Oh, _shit_.

Ed twisted out of Roy’s embrace—which pinned him against the stove, which set his animal fucking instinct flaring into panic—and looked up up into the world’s best eyes while his throat malfunctioned, and his heart clenched hard.

“Your shirt,” he said.

Roy blinked.

“Your fucking _shirt_ ,” Ed said, and his heart skittered, scrambled, spasmed in the center of his chest, like a fucking monster trying to escape—like the bloody embodiment of his own fucking cowardice, because he wanted to; he wanted to _run_ — “You asked me to do one f-fucking thing, after all the shit you do for me, after everything, after who you _are_ , and I fucking forgot about your fucking _shirt_.”

Something clouded in Roy’s eyes, and his hands fell away from where they’d been hovering at Ed’s sides, and he swallowed—once, twice.  He forced a smile, and his eyes were so fucking tired that Ed’s stomach turned.

“It’s just a shirt,” Roy said.  It was a soft voice—quiet, calm.  Disafuckingpointed.

“It’s not,” Ed said, and the heat in his chest felt fucking unbearable; the bile and the self-loathing rose at once, streaming up and rattling his fucking brain— “It’s that you asked for something—and the one time you fucking needed something from _me_ —”

Roy’s eyebrows shifted; he drew a breath and let it out, half as a sigh—half as an _exasperated_ fucking sigh.  “Ed, it’s fine.”

Ed couldn’t physically hold all this steam inside himself; he’d fucking explode.  “It’s not; I wanted—”

“I don’t _mind_ ,” Roy said, louder, and Ed’s guts twined up into a seething knot of prickling, churning, choking misery— “I was hoping to have it for the meeting tomorrow, but it’s just a damn shirt, Ed; I know you’re preoccu—”

Ed’s heart clenched.  So did his fists.  “ _You’re_ never too fucking _preoccupied_ for me!”

Roy stepped back—oh, God; oh, _God_ —and closed his eyes and lifted one hand to massage at the bridge of his nose.  “I don’t—it’s not—a game, Ed; it doesn’t matter; I—”

The words were fucking magma bursting out of him: “It matters to _me_!”

The mask shattered, and Roy’s eyes snapped open, and he was so tired; he was so tired of _this_ — “It’s just a fucking shirt, Ed!”

“It’s _your_ fucking shirt!”  Ed was shouting outright now, because his whole body had tightened like a wire curling in an open flame; because his heart had lodged high in his throat; because he had to speak louder to _make_ Roy understand— “And I can’t come through on _one_ fucking favor, because it’s always about fucking _me_ , it’s always about my shit, my problems, my fucking—I don’t even _know_ what’s going on with you!  I don’t even fucking ask!”

Roy’s eyes had widened incredulously, but his eyebrows drew in tight.  “What the hell are you—”

“I don’t fucking support you!”  Ed’s shoulder sparked with pain; he didn’t have time for this shit, but he couldn’t seem to get his fingers to loosen enough to relieve the tension up his arm.  “I don’t—I don’t give you goddamn fucking _anything_ ; I’m like some fucking _parasite_ —”

“Edward,” Roy said, and there was a sharp note in it now—sharp enough to pierce right through Ed’s ribcage, right through his lungs, right out to the other fucking side.  “How _dare_ you—”

“Fuck that,” Ed said, but his voice was giving out, the fucking traitor; it was shaking hard and failing him— “And fuck you, Mustang; you _know_ —you know I’m right, you know—you know it isn’t _even_ , it isn’t _fair_ ; you fucking give and give and love and love, and all I ever do is burn your fucking dinner and forget your fucking _shirts_ —”

Roy started a syllable, gave up, and made a scoffing noise.  “You haven’t—”

“I just _can’t_!” Ed said.  “Okay?  I fucking can’t, I can’t be what you—need, what you deserve; I can’t be worth—”

“ _Edward_ ,” Roy said, sharper still—silver steel twisting in the meat of Ed’s torso, blood pouring hot down from the wound.  “You don’t get to _decide_ who I do or do not love, or what’s important to me, or what I get angry ab—”

“You _should_ be angry!” Ed howled at him.

“Well, I’m _not_!” Roy yelled back.

“Obviously you are, or you wouldn’t be f-f—” His voice tried to break; he steamrolled through it— “— _fucking_ screaming at me!”

“You started—” Roy closed his eyes, clenched his fingers, and hissed softly through his teeth.  He took a deep breath and let it out again.  “I’m _not_.  I’m not screaming; I’m not angry; it’s just a fucking _shirt_ —”

Ed’s chest was empty—it was hollow; it was vacant; it was a void; all of him had gone so fucking light he couldn’t believe he wasn’t floating.  His heartbeat skimmed through him—dragonfly on water shit; he couldn’t feel a goddamn thing.  He was looking down at the kitchen floor.  He couldn’t feel _anything_ —nothing past the swelling, resonating, reverberating fear; the gut-sick, bone-deep _terror_ of staying in this fucking room, meeting Roy’s fucking eyes, when he just wanted to vomit up his own fucking being and stop being such a worthless piece of _shit_ —

“I gotta go,” he said.

He could feel Roy staring at him, but he couldn’t look.  “Ed—”

The adrenaline was fucking smothering him; his fucking veins were too full; they were strangling him; he couldn’t—he felt hot and then cold and then _fragmented_ —

“I gotta—go,” he said again, and the words felt like spars of fucking driftwood in a shipwreck in a storm—like he was clinging, slipping, buffeted; his eyes were burning, and the wind was roaring in his ears—

He sensed more than he saw Roy reaching for him, and he ducked out under the extended arm and stumbled to the table—grabbed his laptop, clutched it to his chest—his keys were still in his pocket, fuck shoes, fuck speech; he could barely breathe around the jagged-fingered creatures clawing up his throat—

“ _Edward_ —”

He was out the door; he was down the little walkway; he was in the car; he was looking stupidly at the laptop on the passenger seat, and then he was turning the keys and shifting into reverse and backing out of the driveway; he remembered the headlights just in time to illuminate Roy’s silhouette in one flash before he swerved out onto the street—

Driving was okay, though.  Driving he could do.  Driving was just—foot to the pedal and eyes on the road; red lights, green lights, simple commands.  Muscle memory.  Minimal brain work.

He should’ve put his laptop’s seatbelt on.  Statistically significant numbers of laptops probably died on the road because of negligent caretakers who didn’t buckle them in.  His laptop could become a terrible example.  His laptop could _die_ , and then where would he and his NIH grant and also his embarrassingly large collection of downloaded _Nature_ PDFs be?

…well, the PDFs were also on his external hard drive.

His external hard drive was in Roy’s house.  Which he had just walked out of.  Because for some fucking reason, he’d felt compelled to take the best thing that had ever happened to him except for _Al_ and dash it to fucking pieces on the kitchen floor.

He gazed blearily up at the stoplight.  He blinked.  The red vanished, and the green flared, and he smoothed one hand down over the curve of the steering wheel and tried to figure out…

The person behind him _whaled_ on their fucking horn.

He started almost straight out of his fucking skin and jammed his foot on the gas, which almost gave him whiplash and probably guaranteed years of chiropractor visits for his poor laptop, too, and—

And—

He’d really just—

Fucked it.

He’d really fucked it up.  Just like that.  After all the worrying and all the work and…

After a whole fucking _year_ of sheer fucking bliss, he’d just—

Destroyed it.

In five minutes flat.

Oh, God.

Oh, _God_.

Where the hell was he going, anyway?  He’d just—started driving; he hadn’t even thought about where he was driving _to_ ; he…

Judging by the landmarks, autopilot had taken him halfway to the university out of sheer fucking force of habit.  He couldn’t sleep in his lab, though.  Crawling in there and curling up under a desk was too fucking pathetic even for him—and besides, he’d only met one of the night janitors so far; any of the others would probably report him to security as a vagrant or some shit.

And even if he’d had a king-sized bed in his office, there was only one person he wanted to see right now.

He hung a U at the next probably-legal place and fucking booked it to his destination.

The clock in the car said it was nine forty-five when he pulled up; he had no fucking idea anymore where swathes of that time had gone.  He got out, went around to the passenger side to grab his laptop, hugged it to himself, and locked the car.  Then he headed up the driveway in his fucking socks and knocked.

The door opened, and Al’s expectant smile broke in half the instant his eyes found Ed’s.  He breathed, stared, breathed again, and then Al—sweet, sweet little Al; cuddler of kittens, doler of doubt benefits; mincer of oaths—curled his lip into a snarl predators would cower back from, and he said:

“What did that _fucker_ do?”

Words felt like fucking knives—gleaming, sharp-edged, full of potential to produce and create, but right now so fucking cruel.

Right now, lodged in all Ed’s fucking weak spots and twisting slow.

“It wasn’t—” he attempted.  “He didn’t—”

Win wandered up behind Al with a fat textbook in her arms and her eyebrows raised.  “Okay, then, what’d _you_ do?”

“ _Winry_ ,” Al said, flatly, without ever taking his eyes off Ed, and it wasn’t really fair to reprimand her, but all the same—

“All right, all right, sorry,” she said.  She came up closer behind Al’s shoulder, at which point she started to frown.  “Ed, you look like shit.  Get in here, dummy.”  She stared at his laptop as he stumbled over the threshold; Al put an arm around him to guide him in further and then pulled the door shut behind him.  “Is that all you brought?” she asked.  “Really?”

“It’s okay,” Al said, in his Soothing Voice, and probably that should’ve felt condescending, but instead it felt like the rain of fucking heaven—like nectar, like a balm.  “That’s fine.  I’ll get you some pajamas, okay?  When was the last time you ate, Brother?”

“I forget,” he said, which was the truth.  Winry snorted, and he tried to glare at her, although it probably wasn’t too impressive.  “Lunch, probably.  Maybe.  I dunno.”

“What was ‘lunch’?” Winry asked.  “A bag of Cheetos and a cookie?”

It was slowly coming back—accessing today’s memories was like swimming through fog.  “I put leftovers in the ‘science only’ microwave.  I l-live on the edge.”

“You’re going to give yourself the Black Death that way,” Winry said.  She folded the textbook under one arm and grabbed his wrist with the other.  “C’mon.  Dinnertime.  What do you want?  Wait, stupid question; you’re going to want whatever I give you.”

“Okay,” Ed said, allowing her to drag him into the kitchen and set him down in one of the chairs and start bustling around him, because what else was he supposed to do…?

“I’ll be right back, Brother,” Al said.

“Okay,” Ed said again, helpless, feeling powerfully like he was four years old again, feeling vaguely dizzy, feeling…

Bereft.  Was that the word?

“Here,” Winry said.  Something _fwump_ ed down on his shoulders—a blanket.

“I’m not in shock,” he said, although his instinct was to tug it in a little bit around himself.

Winry made a contemplative noise.  “You sure about that?”  Before he could respond, she thunked a glass of water down on the table in front of him.  “Drink.  Clear your head.  I’ll make you hot chocolate.”

Ed’s attention drew like a fucking magnet to Al coming in from the hall with a pile of folded clothing in his arms.  He laid it on one of the chairs and then settled on the one nearest to Ed, scooting in a little closer.

“Brother,” he said softly, “what happened?”

Ed tried to reach up to scrub a hand over his face and realized he still had the laptop in his arms.  He set it on the table next to the water; Winry leaned against the edge of the counter while the electric kettle warmed up.

“I dunno,” Ed said.  “I mean, I do, I just—I dunno when it all—went—fucked up.  Just—I mean, it’s _me_ ; it’s… I couldn’t make enough time to get through to him and try to figure out why this case is eating him alive, and he asked me to do _one_ fucking thing for him after everything he does for me, and… and he said we weren’t fighting, but we were, and we should’ve been, and—”

“I’ll talk to him,” Al said quietly, looking down at his crossed arms.

“No,” Ed said, shakily, “you won’t.  I fucked this up—me.  You’ve cleaned up enough of my goddamn interpersonal messes over the years, Al; this isn’t your fault, and I’m not your responsib—”

“Ed,” Al said, gaze lifting to lock with his.  “I want to.  I want to help.  I want you to letme help.  You’ve been working your butt off so I didn’t have to since we were _ten years old_.  And I hope you didn’t think for a darned minute that I wasn’t going to notice that you’re depositing money into my bank account at random intervals.”

Ed had known he was going to _notice_ —Al was the kind of person who actually balanced his checkbook, which no one else in the entire universe ever seemed to have done in their lives—but he’d figured it would take longer than five weeks.

“I haven’t spent any of it, by the way,” Al said.  “I’m saving it for a new car for you.”

“Bank of Alphonse,” Winry said brightly.  “Even more secure than the Swiss.”

“And he doesn’t think I’m a fucking peasant for not speaking French,” Ed said.

Winry smiled, putting a dish of something that looked like thick, glorious lasagna in the microwave, and Ed realized he was starving and probably shaking and basically a fucking wreck, and…

And hadn’t he gotten past all this shit?  Wasn’t that the point of being an adult—the point of _living_?  Weren’t you supposed to hit some kind of a threshold, and all the bullshit fell away, and things just—worked?  You figured it out?  Shit made sense?

How the hell were you supposed to keep dragging your weary-ass fucking body through another fucking day of another fucking week of another fucking era of your stupid life if it just _never got easier_?

Al stood when the kettle boiled and reached up—with far too little trouble altogether—to get Ed a mug from high in the cabinet.  He opened a packet of powdered cocoa and poured everything in, and then he found a mason jar of marshmallows (who even put things in mason jars for real, rather than just as a sort of hipster fashion statement thing?) and dumped at least a dozen on the top.

He stirred thoroughly, set the mug in front of Ed, and leaned against the table, face completely still.  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

“I dunno,” Ed said, which was the honest fucking truth.  “I just… Get up in the morning tomorrow and keep going, I guess.”

If he drank any of his magnificent sugar-sludge-water this soon, he’d burn his whole fucking mouth again, so despite wanting very little more than to drown himself in it, he refrained.

Al heaved a soft sigh and nodded slowly.  “When you’re ready, though, promise me you’ll talk to him.”

Ed’s stomach lurched.  “About fucking what?”

Al looked him in the eyes.  “About how one disagreement does not invalidate a year of happiness.  About how well you two suit each other no matter what was said in stress and anger.  About how good you are together, and how much love there is between you, and how absolutely beautiful that is to finally have in your life, Ed.”

Ed buried his face in his hands.

“Oops,” Al said.

“Don’t worry,” Winry said.  “I got this.  Ed, look—food.”

The smell was torment enough; she grabbed the dish up in a potholder and slung it down on the table in front of him, then brandished a fork.

“Listen,” she said, waving it until he took it.  “Whatever happens, you’re Ed— _our_ Ed.  You always have a home, and we always have your back.  Okay?”

Easy for her to say—she hadn’t had to live with his dumb ass for an extended period since they all got to college.

But Al was smiling at him, too, in a heartbroken kind of way, and it was the least he could do to swallow enough of his objections to force out, “Okay.”

If there were any two people on the planet who could right all of the shit he’d toppled over in his own stupid life, he was looking at them.

And that was something to be thankful for.

  


* * *

  


Roy looks like shit.

Ed’s heart clenches up so tight, so small, it must be dragging every fucking capillary in towards it—it feels like he’s imploding.

The circles under Roy’s eyes weren’t this deep two days ago, the last time Ed saw him through this screen—were they?  Ed would have noticed.  _That_ he would have fucking noticed; and even if he hadn’t, Al would’ve said something; it must…

But it doesn’t change that much.

It doesn’t change the fact that there’s been a psychological shitstorm behind Roy’s eyes this entire time, and Ed was so absorbed in his own damn shit that didn’t have a motherfucking clue.

Roy’s got a five-o’-clock shadow half-obscured by a fat wad of gauze taped to his cheek and the underside of his jaw, which must be obnoxiously uncomfortable.  He’s tucked into bed, wearing what looks like his all-time-favorite flannel pajamas, and it fucking hurts not to be there, no matter what the hell is going on.

Ed swallows until his throat clears enough to speak through.  It takes a couple tries.

“That’s a good look for you,” he says.

The corners of Roy’s mouth shift up about a centimeter.

And then they flatten out.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“That you didn’t tell me?” Ed asks.  “Or that I found out?”

“Both,” Roy says.

At least he’s being honest about that.

Ed pulls in a breath and holds it, wringing it for oxygen, while he tries to grasp at the flimsy little thoughts twirling through his brain like falling flakes of ash.

Bottom line, really, is that nobody’s ever gained anything by not getting to the fucking point.

“So,” he says.  “How bad is it?”

Roy doesn’t pretend to think Ed’s asking about the gash on his jaw—although he wants to know about that, too.  It looks like Roy’s okay—his eyes are clear; he’s lucid so far; Riza would’ve dragged him right back to the hospital by the scruff of his neck if she had any doubts about his general soundness of mind and body.

What Roy does is lift a hand, push his unusually lank-looking bangs back off of his forehead, draw a breath, let it out, and look Ed in the eyes as much as the mirrored screens allow.

“I’m flying out to D.C. next week,” he says.  “Tuesday afternoon.  I’m supposed to appear in court on Wednesday.”

Fucking figures.  That’s exactly when Ed’s supposed to get back.

Roy knows it.  And by his expression, he also knows that he hasn’t even begun to answer the question.

He swallows, then cringes, then runs his tongue over his lips.

Ed’s heart keeps pounding, and his shoulder throbs with it, and he doesn’t quite dare speak.

“In April of 2007,” Roy says—softly, _softly_ , with a faint hint of a tremor underneath, “Bradley was heading our base in the Paktika province—ours was one of many; Paktika had been a hotbed since the beginning of the war.  The Taliban had a strong presence and sometimes strong support.  The Army extended the standard tour of duty on the eleventh of the month, up until which I’d been six weeks away from going back to Fort Lewis.  A week after that, Bradley sent us in to a village based on reports that they were harboring militants in a meeting hall, with orders to smoke them out.”

To say that Ed doesn’t like where this is going would be a grievous fucking insult to everyone involved.

Roy looks away for a second—probably not so much at the wall as straight through it, straight through time.  Straight through thirteen fucking years.

Is this the thing that wakes him in the middle of the night?

Or is it another incident altogether?

Fifteen months in combat probably spoiled him for choice.

Ed timed Roy’s heart-rate once while they were huddled together on the couch—sixty-five beats per minute.  But that’s resting.  How fast is it going now?  How many times has his heart squeezed and released by the time he parts his lips again to say—

“He and I had both been there on a few occasions—rapport with the locals was supposed to be one of our primary goals, in large part as a means of getting intelligence, although I suppose there was a bit of magnanimous intention in it somewhere.  I was fairly sure from those experiences—and the conversations in particular—that they wouldn’t be harboring insurgents anywhere in that town.”

He looks at Ed.

He looks away.

“Bradley ordered us to go in and rig all of the surrounding streets with explosives,” he says, “and set the hall on fire to flush them out.”  His eyes dart to the screen, and then away again; he has never, in the five fucking years that Ed has known him, looked so… small.  Brittle.  Broken.  “At that point, we were supposed to hold a vantage point from the roof of one of the nearby buildings to make sure no one slipped away.”

It sounds like a fucking movie.  Like a stupid, overblown, fucking _contrived_ fake plot constructed specifically to stir up trepidation in some theoretical audience—

“And?” Ed asks, and his voice comes out weak as shit—thready.  Almost cracked.

“It wasn’t the fucking Taliban,” Roy says.  He meets Ed’s eyes again, and Ed’s guts drop out, and the void they leave in him is so, so fucking cold.  “It was a wedding.”

This can’t be happening—this can’t _have_ happened.

Ed feels his breath scraping up and down his throat—once, twice, three times.  This is a vivid fucking dream.  This is a nasty nightmare cooked up by the sickest, darkest parts of his subconscious; this is not _real_ —

“Twelve civilians,” Roy says.  “Two were children—a boy who was six, and a little girl who was four.”  His voice starts to shake.  “They made it out of the building,” he says.  “The two kids—their clothes were on fire; they were screaming so loud it—”

He closes his eyes.  He breathes in, and out, and then he lays one hand over his mouth and blinks up at the ceiling for a couple of seconds.

Ed barely fucking recognizes him right now.

“They hit one of the charges,” Roy says.  “The ones that we’d set to stop anyone from escaping.  Blew out the whole front wall of the shop across the street.  The rubble flew so far it triggered a second one.”

Roy wraps his arms around himself and looks down at the keyboard, or maybe his knees, or the bedsheet—or maybe nothing at all.  Maybe he’s not even seeing anything; maybe he’s not even _there_.  Not really.

“We knew,” he says.  “Of course we fucking knew; I mean—we did what we were told, but Bradley had to have known, and we all knew—we all _felt_ it; we—”

He stops.  He swallows.  He picks with the nail of his index finger at the edge of the gauze on his face.

“The trial started yesterday,” he says.  “He’s been accused of… there’s a list.  There’s a list of other incidents.  That’s what they call them; they say ‘incidents’ like it changes—”

He pushes his hand back through his hair again.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he says.

Ed—

—doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know what to think; his head is a fucking whirlwind—a screaming dervish of what should have been fucking impossibilities, dragging at the things he thought he knew right up until this solitary conversation cracked the core right out of his whole fucking world.

“Could you—” he starts, and the words fucking splinter into silence.  He clears his throat, swallows, tries again.  “Could you end up in prison for this?”

He really did just speak that fucking sentence.

Please, please, _please_ let this be a fucking _dream_ —

“Possibly,” Roy says, and the tremulous line of his mouth shifts into something odd and almost a little bit—amused.  “I’m not the one on trial, so I couldn’t be convicted, but it’s… not outside the realm of possibility that once I testify, they’ll try me next.”  He hesitates, and then it’s definitely a smile—but it’s the cruelest, coldest, darkest one Ed thinks he’s ever fucking seen.  “But I don’t think they would.  I’m very good at convincing people to like me.”

_You’re good at lying, you mean,_ jumps unbidden into Ed’s fucking traitor of a brain.  _You’re good at playing people.  You’re good at manipulating them._

He doesn’t mean that.

He _doesn’t_.

He doesn’t really think that’s true; it’s just—

Right now—

Just about fucking anything could be.

Ed fights to wrangle words out of his mouth that aren’t just fucking—what?  Accusations?

“So—” he says.  “You—”

Roy’s watching him—too smart; too damn smart by half; Roy just _knows_.

“I was responsible?” he asks, voice low and toneless.  Calm.  Fucking _collected_.  “I watched them die?”  He pushes his hand back through his hair again, and his face contorts for a second before he smoothes it out.  “Yes.  And yes.”  He looks at Ed.  He’s like some fucking stranger—like somebody off the street.  What the hell happened to _Roy_?  Schmoopy, stupid, sweet fucking Roy—who the hell is this dead-eyed fucking mercenary who let another man tell him to _murder_ —?  “What else would you like to know?”

All this time.

All this time, he’s had that blood on his hands.

Every impression of his fingertips; every graze of his palms—every time they twined their hands together; every time they fucking _touched—_

Ed asks the only thing he can think of.  “Why didn’t you—tell me?”

“Because I knew you would look at me,” Roy says, “the way you’re looking at me now.”

The thundering roll of Ed’s heartbeat in his ears drowns out even the howl of the hurricane.  This can’t—as if _he_ —

“I don’t blame you,” Roy says.  He’s too calm.  He’s too fucking calm.  Like he was _waiting_ , all this time—almost like he fucking practiced, because he was expecting it; because he knew— “That’s the way I look at myself.”

“You should have said something.”  Ed hears the shudder in his voice, but honestly it’s a surprise he can muster any volume at all.  “You should have fucking—you _should_ have—”

Fucking LCD screens have never done Roy Mustang justice.  No combination of colored pixels can capture him in all of his complexity—the way he moves; the subtleties of the motion of his hands and the nuances of the expressions of his face.  An approximation just isn’t enough.  Elicia sometimes encapsulates the spirit, but it’s never accurate.  Representation is flat, and it always falls short.

And all the same—Roy’s never looked older or fucking wearier than he does right now.

Like the fight’s gone out of him.

Like there’s just no fucking point.

“All I ever wanted,” he says, quietly, but Ed’s listening so hard despite the torrent in his brain that it might as well be a fucking shout, “was to be worthy of loving you.  That’s it.  Once I found you, I knew that was… the most important thing I could do with my life, at this point.  The most important thing I could become.  Someone who loved you.  That was all I wanted to be.”  He presses the knuckles of his right hand in against his eye.  “And it was—stupid, insufferably stupid, I suppose, but I always… I liked to think that maybe, if I did that _well_ enough, the rest of this—the rest of me—could just be memories that belonged to someone else.”

Of course it’s Ed’s fault—somehow, backwards, in a roundabout kind of way.  It always is.

That’s not fair.  That’s not _fair_.  No, he didn’t fucking ask; no, he didn’t fucking reach out and create the opportunity for Roy to speak about it; apparently, he didn’t even establish the fucking foundation of mutual respect or whatever psychoanalytical bullshit it is that would’ve been required for Roy to feel safe enough to open up, but—

“You should’ve told me,” he says, sounding faint to his own fucking ears.  “You know everything _about_ me, and I still—”

Fuck.  Jesus fucking Christ.

Everything in him just keeps—falling.  With a sick jerk like a broken elevator, over and over and over again—

“I don’t even know where you grew up,” he says.  “I don’t know how you met Riza.  I don’t know fucking _anything_ about you; I don’t—you dole out these bits and fucking pieces, sometimes, but I don’t know what they come from; I don’t know where _you_ come from, and—”

“It’s all just shit like this,” Roy says.  “It’s just heaps of shit like this, Ed; it’s nothing you would _want_ to know, and I don’t need sympathy, or pity, and—you’ve had it so much worse; you’ve gotten through things I can’t even imagine; I—”

“It’s not a fucking contest,” Ed says.  It feels like the words scald his throat on the way up.  “You should have _told_ me.  About—something, God, just—anything, some part of you, _this_ part—”

Those kids would be nineteen and seventeen now.  Maybe they’d be in school.  Maybe they’d want to be doctors, or teachers, or musicians—maybe they’d be moody-ass teenagers complaining about what was for dinner, bumming around with their friends, procrastinating on their homework, demanding that their parents leave them alone.  Crying into their pillows over stupid-ass crushes.  Tasting really good coffee for the first time.

How is it _possible_ that someone who’s supported Ed so fucking unconditionally could have taken that away?

How can Roy Mustang be a fucking _murderer_?

And it’s not—not quite—the same as killing in cold blood.  It’s not quite like waking up one morning and specifically deciding to end the existence of another human being.

But it’s not that different.

Is it?

Not really.

Ed’s head is pounding.  His fucking shoulder, too; his heart—way too fucking fast; way too fucking jittery.  It’s like he’s coming loose—like the threads that tether him to reality are fraying; like they’re thinning and then snapping one at a fucking time, and he’s drifting further from anything concretely comprehensible with every one that goes—

He doesn’t even know what he’s fucking feeling.

He’s—

What?

It’s like there’s fucking _fury_ in him, but—distantly.  Behind two feet of glass.  He can press his open hand against the surface and almost feel the heat, but…

Mostly he feels—

Shaken.

Gutted.

Numb.

And there’s all this fucking _hurt_ underneath it, as the icy surface of the window starts to crack—and a worse kind of fucking anger at himself for trying to… what?  Repossess this shit?  Make it about him, when it’s anything but?  Twist something so fucking separate from his being into another stupid footnote in his endless self-indulgent piece of shit sob story?

His head feels too fucking heavy to hold up anymore; he drops it into one hand and and just—

“Ed,” Roy says, and his voice is the _same_.  His voice is still soft and sweet and fucking loving, and it still pulls some part of Ed’s psyche gently towards it; it still starts to warm him at the fucking core—

Everything they’ve ever had is fucking tarnished.

Isn’t it?

Every fucking moment has this dreck-black shadow strewn across it now, forever.

“I trusted you,” Ed hears himself say.  “With everything I have ever fucking had.  With everything I _am_.”

“I know,” Roy says.

And then, as he’s staring at the inside of his palm, the question that’s been ricocheting around his skull rattles its way loose: “Is that what you dream about?”

Roy’s silent for a second.  Ed can feel the flit of his pulse in his own skin where his thumb’s pressed against his forehead.

“Does it matter?” Roy asks softly.

Does it?  Does it change anything?  If that’s what’s been tormenting him one, two, sometimes three nights a week—does it ameliorate any of what was done?  If that little girl is the one he’s been trying to save over and over and over, every fucking time he wakes up in the dark—does that change the sentence?  Does repentance—does suffering in the name of regret—somehow lessen the severity of the original crime?

“I don’t know,” Ed says.  Words taste like rusted nails—bent and bloody as he spits them out.  “I don’t fucking know.  I just—”

“I’m sorry,” Roy says.

That phrase is for ordinary things—ordinary problems, ordinary mistakes.  Missteps.  Miscalculations.  Hitting someone on accident while you’re gesticulating.  Spilling your drink on somebody’s shirt.

And it can be bigger—just like _love_ gets thrown around everywhere, but you can fucking hear the way the Earth trembles when it really hits home.  It can be for when you genuinely hurt somebody.  It can be for trying to offer someone a tiny bit of refuge in the wake of a tremendous loss.

But it’s not big enough for this.

Ed’s brain churns like a fucking steam engine—like a whole damn factory, machinery moving so fast the individual parts begin to blur, and the black smoke billows in the sky.

There is no changing this.

This is a fact—this is a crystallized, completed moment that has already become a piece of history.  It cannot be undone; it cannot be erased; it cannot be unmade.

Roy killed innocent people.

But the thing is—

Events don’t exist in a vacuum.  Events don’t occur on their own.  They appear at the end of a chain—at the end of dozens of tiny, interwoven chains; as a knot in a weave too complicated for the human brain to process, most of the time.  Infinite factors converge on every single action, and every _re_ action is the inevitable next link down the line.

Roy killed innocent people in a warzone, after almost a year of living in an environment Ed can’t begin to imagine.

What’s it even _like_?

He vaguely remembers some of the media coverage, but he was young, and he had his own and Al’s survival to account for; he couldn’t have spared the time to watch the news even if he’d wanted another reason to feel like the walls were closing in.

He doesn’t know.

He can’t conceptualize.

The pressure from the inside—from superiors, commanders; from every other soldier; the cramped, compressing angles of the edges of the mold; the slowly-building agony of trying to fit the shape of the American warrior carrying the flag.  The drag of the weapons; the weight of the world bound up in the folds of the fatigues.  The schedule.  The demands.

And the spreading poison of the possibility of death at every turn.

He doesn’t know how many people died while Roy watched—well before it was those two kids at the wedding.  He doesn’t know if Roy saw _Hughes_ die; he doesn’t know any of the smothered truth of what happened there, what happened to Roy when he was younger than Ed is now—when Roy was still figuring out what the fuck it meant to be alive, riding the Bowie knife’s edge between survival and a last glance down the barrel of the wrong fucking gun—

Are they even the only ones—those kids?  Were there others before?  How _many_?

People keep telling Ed that he’s one of the smartest people on the fucking planet—which is bullshit anyway; having the dumb fucking luck to get born in a place where he had access to enough resources to make shit happen has very little to do with brainpower.  He grabbed enough fucking squares in Bingo to win.  Yeah, he worked hard.  Yeah, he racked his own damn intellect for everything it’d cough up and turned it upside-down to shake out its pockets.  He made it happen.  But he couldn’t have done jackshit if he hadn’t had the _means_ , and that has nothing to do with how fucking smart he was or is or ought to be.

But in any goddamn case—

He’s got a pretty hefty IQ battering ram to work with, all things considered.

And he can’t even begin to understand what Roy went through.

It’s not as fucking simple as _He killed them_.

Except it is, too; it’s _true_ ; there’s no amount of shiny-ass fucking medals or courtroom equivocation that can change it.

In an inhuman situation, Roy did an inhuman thing.

None of the rest of the things he’s done—none of the love, none of the laughter, none of the fucking _beauty_ of who he is and how much stronger he’s made Ed’s soul—are any less real for that.

That’s the part…

Because what the fuck would it mean to _accept_ it?

But he can’t—

But it’s _Roy_ —

There aren’t any words for this.  Even someone who could bend those bastards to his will couldn’t find any to encapsulate something that’s just this—

Wrong.

In so, so, so fucking many different ways.

Ed sounds like a broken record—and he feels like one, too.  Fucking flimsy plastic shards with jagged edges and no tune.

“You should have told me,” he says.

All he can see is the white sheets and the purple pillowcase and his own fucking knee and the corner of the laptop screen.  Everything’s getting fucking blurry as his vision wavers—dark encroaching at the sides like a tunnel caving in.

“I know,” Roy says.  “I’m sorry.”

Ed’s head is full of fucking granite.  He needs both hands to hold it just to keep it still attached.  “You keep f-fucking _saying_ that—”

“It keeps being true,” Roy says.  There’s a note of urgency seeping into his voice now, but Ed can’t look at him; just fucking _can’t_.  “I told—others.  Before I met you.  I know it doesn’t… change anything; I know it doesn’t make a difference.  But I told people I was trying to love, and I lost them, and I just—” His voice thins until it’s close to fucking breaking.  “I just—couldn’t, Ed.  I couldn’t risk it.  Not you.”

Two hands aren’t enough.  Not enough to bear the weight of his own fucking cranium; not enough to build something that’ll last.

“Everything,” Ed forces past the tightness in his throat—the short, sharp breaths and the suffocating heat that prickles everywhere beneath his skin.  “I told you fucking— _everything_ , Roy, every last fucking secret; every fucking failure; everything I _had_ —”

“I know,” Roy says, and this time his voice fucking cracks right down the middle.  “I _know_ , Ed, and I love you for it; I have _always_ loved you for it—you are so fucking _brave_ for being so entirely who you are, and I don’t think you’ve ever even realized—”

Ed curls his fingers in against his face; his nails scrape at his forehead, his browbones.  “Shut up.”

“I love you,” Roy says, and his voice just— _shatters_ , crumbles, like a fucking dam, and the water rushes through, and Roy fucking Mustang is in _tears_ , and Ed can’t even look at him.  “Please, Ed, don’t—I know it wasn’t—fair, I know—I know I’m weak, Ed; I’m a fucking coward, but _please_ d-don’t fucking l-leave me—m-most days you’re the only th-thing that makes sense; _loving_ you is the only th-th-thing that makes sense—Ed, _please_ —”

Silence.

But not just words; not just speech suddenly aborted.

Ed’s own fucking ragged breaths are the only ones he can hear.

He grinds the heels of his hands in against his eyes for another second and makes himself look up.

The Skype window’s blank.  There’s an error message; his vision’s too hazy to make it out.

He blinks, breathes, tilts his head back and stares at the ceiling, blinks again.

_Connection lost_.

No fucking kidding.


End file.
